What your Facebook Profile Picture Reveals about your Personality

TL;DR

This study explores automatic recognition of personality traits from Facebook profile pictures by analyzing visual features, revealing correlations between image characteristics and traits, and demonstrating that computer classification outperforms human judgment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for automatic personality recognition from social media images, analyzing visual features and comparing machine accuracy to human ratings.

Findings

Computer classification outperforms humans in recognizing Extraversion and Neuroticism.

Certain visual patterns correlate with specific personality traits.

Analysis of visual features provides insights into personality expression on social media.

Abstract

People spend considerable effort managing the impressions they give others. Social psychologists have shown that people manage these impressions differently depending upon their personality. Facebook and other social media provide a new forum for this fundamental process; hence, understanding people's behaviour on social media could provide interesting insights on their personality. In this paper we investigate automatic personality recognition from Facebook profile pictures. We analyze the effectiveness of four families of visual features and we discuss some human interpretable patterns that explain the personality traits of the individuals. For example, extroverts and agreeable individuals tend to have warm colored pictures and to exhibit many faces in their portraits, mirroring their inclination to socialize; while neurotic ones have a prevalence of pictures of indoor places. Then, we propose a classification approach to automatically recognize personality traits from these visual features. Finally, we compare the performance of our classification approach to the one obtained by human raters and we show that computer-based classifications are significantly more accurate than averaged human-based classifications for Extraversion and Neuroticism.