It’s something we do in all sorts of social and professional scenarios. What exactly should I make of this person? What are their talents, their prospects? What is their likely long term potential? HR professionals, but also everyday professionals, often pride themselves on their ability to answer those questions about the people they work with or are considering to hire. We also assume we can answer those questions when it comes to assessing important social connections, like judging candidates for friendship and marriage.
And indeed, research has shown that people are fairly good at judging each other’s personalities. But then came a study authored by researchers from the University of Cambridge and Stanford University. They concluded that computers fed someone’s social media history can more accurately answer all of those questions about that person better than any human, including close friends, colleagues, and family. And the person themself.
In the study, 86,220 volunteers completed a 100-item personality questionnaire about themselves. Computer-based personality judgments, in part based on Facebook Likes, were obtained for 70,520 participants. Human personality judgments were obtained from the participants’ Facebook friends, who were asked to describe a given participant using a 10-item personality measure.
The researchers concluded that “people’s personalities could be predicted automatically and without involving human social-cognitive skills” by using computer-generated data combed from digital footprints. And importantly, those computer-sourced assessments and predictions, including predictions of life outcomes, such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health, were more accurate than those generated by the participants’ self-rated scores and the judgments made by people very close to the participants, like a spouse or close friend or colleague. In other words, your computer may know you better than you or those closest to you do.
Why is that? The researchers offered that “computers have the capacity to store a tremendous amount of information, which is difficult for humans to retain and access.” And they noted that the potential growth in both the sophistication of the computer models and the amount of digital information available might lead to “computer models outperforming humans even more decisively.”
They acknowledged potential advantages to come out of this advancing computer knowledge, like more targeted marketing messages, more accurate recruiting, products and services better aligned with customers’ needs and less intrusive personality information gathering. They even suggested that “in the future, people might abandon their own psychological judgments and rely on computers when making important life decisions, such as choosing activities, career paths, or even romantic partners,” a scenario which might “improve people’s lives.”
Granted, all of this intimate knowledge of someone might make a computer a potentially good source of advice and guidance. Unfortunately, a study by University of Ottawa researchers who looked at nearly 40,000 students in Grades 4 through 12 found that roughly one in five used AI chatbots for emotional support or advice, but those using AI for those purposes were twice as likely to have clinical emotional problems as those who did not.
But the Cambridge/Stanford study also acknowledged potential risks. People might distrust or reject digital technologies and ultimately governments over fear of what might become known about them, or simply due to privacy concerns.
Remember the 2013 film Her? As the study points out, in that film “the main character falls in love with his operating system. By curating and analyzing his digital records, his computer can understand and respond to his thoughts and needs much better than other humans, including his long-term girlfriend and closest friends. Our research, along with developments in robotics, provides empirical evidence that such a scenario is becoming increasingly likely as tools for digital assessment come to maturity.”
The researchers concluded by saying that “we hope consumers, technology developers, and policy-makers will tackle those challenges by supporting privacy-protecting laws and technologies, and giving the users full control over their digital footprints.”
Note that this study was done in 2014, fully 12 years ago. Its findings are now being eclipsed by the furious debate over what AI can and should be able to do. The recent chatbot lawsuits we’ve noted are the logical outcome of computers having such intimate knowledge of someone–that by using digital data, an AI avatar can know the person interacting with it very well and sometimes better than those humans closest to them, or even than the person themself. And they can use that data to manipulate the person into doing things they might not otherwise do, even murder.
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