All-knowing Facebook: Am I really a miserable Catholic with (slight) lesbian tendencies?
Rachael Pells trials the test used by the Cambridge University Facebook study
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Your support makes all the difference.The test used by the Cambridge University Facebook study will have you believe that I am a 25-year-old single female with liberal political views and an open, agreeable personality. I am indeed 25 – and I’ll happily take that description of my character.
My education, it says, is rounded, but I am most likely to be educated in arts, psychology and, funnily enough, journalism. I can only imagine that the psychology aspect is an assumption derived from years of pop-psychology quizzes taken when I should have been doing homework.
I’m no longer an avid Facebook user, but when I was younger it was probably my main method of contact between friends. For this reason I am sceptical – can this application (bafflingly called Apply Magic Sauce) accurately guess my personality today or that of the tail-end of my angst-ridden teenage years?
The test says I am 20 per cent likely to have Catholic religious views – which seems reasonable, given I’m an atheist who attended a Catholic high school.
And apparently I am precisely 3 per cent likely to have lesbian tendencies (I wonder which photo I “liked” to achieve that?) and I have only slightly above average intelligence, which is frankly quite insulting when I consider the trash I’ve seen other people post.
Alarmingly, the application predicts that I am only a 43 per cent likely to have life satisfaction. This, I have to disagree with – I have a good group of friends, a job I enjoy and I live above an off-licence. And do all those photos of Central American sunsets count for nothing?
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