By Christopher Shea
Are you more the Facebook or Twitter “type”? Psychologists have identified personality differences in users of the two social-media sites.
Three hundred people were quizzed about their social-media habits, and also took a test of personality. That test focused on the “Big Five” personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. But the psychologists also measured some more-specific qualities, including sociability and “need for cognition” (basically, intellectual appetite).
People who used Facebook largely to socialize tended to be younger, more social, and more neurotic — suggesting that Facebook habitués use the site partly as a tool to alleviate loneliness, the researchers said. (That echoes findings from earlier studies.) People who used Twitter to socialize, meanwhile, scored high on openness and sociability but low on conscientiousness. So they’d be more likely to use Twitter to procrastinate, the authors proposed.
There were interesting differences, too, when it came to using the two sites to seek or spread information. Twitter users who did this were high on conscientiousness and need for cognition, and low on neuroticism. In short, they were focused, no-nonsense information-gatherers. People who sought information on Facebook, in contrast, were considerably less intellectually curious.
Other studies have examined the personality of Facebook users, but this was the first, its authors said, to incorporate Twitter as well.
Source: “A Tale of Two Sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the Personality Predictors of Social Media Usage,” David John Hughes, Moss Rowe, Mark Batey and Andrew Lee, Computers in Human Behavior (March)
Are you more the Facebook or Twitter “type”? Psychologists have identified personality differences in users of the two social-media sites.
Three hundred people were quizzed about their social-media habits, and also took a test of personality. That test focused on the “Big Five” personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. But the psychologists also measured some more-specific qualities, including sociability and “need for cognition” (basically, intellectual appetite).
People who used Facebook largely to socialize tended to be younger, more social, and more neurotic — suggesting that Facebook habitués use the site partly as a tool to alleviate loneliness, the researchers said. (That echoes findings from earlier studies.) People who used Twitter to socialize, meanwhile, scored high on openness and sociability but low on conscientiousness. So they’d be more likely to use Twitter to procrastinate, the authors proposed.
There were interesting differences, too, when it came to using the two sites to seek or spread information. Twitter users who did this were high on conscientiousness and need for cognition, and low on neuroticism. In short, they were focused, no-nonsense information-gatherers. People who sought information on Facebook, in contrast, were considerably less intellectually curious.
Other studies have examined the personality of Facebook users, but this was the first, its authors said, to incorporate Twitter as well.
Source: “A Tale of Two Sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the Personality Predictors of Social Media Usage,” David John Hughes, Moss Rowe, Mark Batey and Andrew Lee, Computers in Human Behavior (March)
