Is It Possible Your Computer Knows You Best? Certainly!

We live in a social-media crazed world and we pay for it. Privacy? Maybe that should be a lack of it.

The next time you "Like" something on Facebook, take a pause and think about it. Why? A new study reveals that your computer may know you better than your friends, and even your spouse.

How does this happen? Simply by analyzing your Facebook "Likes."

Here's all the numbers and criteria used in the research.

In the study, 86,000 volunteers were asked to complete a 100-question personality test that assessed participants’ personalities based on the “big five” traits: conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness, and neuroticism.

The volunteers were then invited to ask friends and family to judge their personalities with a shorter ten-question survey.

The 17,622 participants were judged by one friend or family member, while 14,410 were judged by two people.

Surprisingly, a computer could more accurately predict the participants’ personalities than their co-workers if they had as little as 10 “Likes,” and better than their family members or spouse with 70 “Likes” and 300 “Likes,” respectively.

The results reveal much about our social-media crazed world— and our privacy, or lack thereof, in it.

The upside? Facebook "Likes" can be our guide in many important life decisions: who to marry, who to hire, or even, as the co-author of the study, Dr. David Stillwell, said, who to “elect as president."