Computers Know if Your Relationship Will Last
AS TIME GOES BY
We choose to reveal a lot of information on social media, but it turns out computers can analyze our Facebook profiles and find out things we might not even know about ourselves.
A recent study by researchers at Facebook and Cornell set out to see if it was possible to automatically guess who your significant other (SO) was just by looking at your friends and their friendships with each other [1]. They analyzed people who listed themselves as "in a relationship" or "married" on Facebook.
A natural guess might be that the person who knows the greatest number of your friends is your SO. However, researchers found that a better guess was based on picking the person who knew people from the highest number of your different social circles.
For example, on Facebook I have a bunch of very distinct groups of friends: family members, high school friends, undergraduate friends, grad school friends, current colleagues, my hockey team, and a group of friends I made in an online forum. There are almost no links between these groups. For example, no one from my hockey team knows any of my other friends.
The one exception? My husband. He knows people from every one of these groups.
This idea is called social dispersion. Using the rule that an SO would be connected to the greatest number of friend groups, the researchers built a computer algorithm that could guess a SO with very high accuracy. For married users in the U.S., they guessed correctly over 76% of the time – especially impressive since they were choosing from lists of hundreds of friends.
But one of the most interesting results of this research comes from the cases where they were wrong. The researchers went back to Facebook two months after their initial analysis and looked at the people for whom they had guessed "incorrectly" – i.e. the person their algorithm chose was not the actual SO. Among the 400,000 people who had listed themselves as "in a relationship" originally, if the algorithm guessed wrong, the person was 50% more likely to be listed as "single" 60 days later.
In other words, if your significant other isn't the person connected to the highest number of your social circles, there's a much greater chance that you're going to break up.
So, in your own relationships, think about how well connected your significant other is to your different groups of friends. It may give you some insight into how things will work out for you going forward. And, in the meantime, file this away as a yet another slightly creepy insight computers can gain by analyzing your social media data.
References
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