Instead of analyzing the content of user lists, such as favorite TV shows, activities, and music, they learned that simple “meta-data”—such as the amount of information shared—“turned out to be much more useful and predictive than the original raw data.” The computations produced on the strength of these behavioral metrics, when combined with automated linguistic analysis and internal Facebook statistics, led the research team to conclude that “we can predict a user’s score for a personality trait to within just more than one-tenth of its actual value.”51
