Do those bong photos on Facebook really translate to workplace habits?

Privacy is dead. We hear that a lot these days. Vast relational databases keep records of our electronic interactions. Even our snail mail is actively logged. But if privacy is dead, it’s a death partly of our own making. We might not want Target data mining our purchases to tell us we're pregnant, but posting on Twitter or Facebook is an active choice.

Employers and schools in particular have increasingly been looking at individuals’ social networking footprints as part of the hiring or admissions process, and the photos of that awesome new bong or tweets about a particularly terrible boss can have consequences. The reaction against this trend has resulted in action at the state and federal level. Facebook is clearly not excited about this development either. But are these organizations even learning anything useful from their cyberstalking? A group of researchers at North Carolina State University decided to find out.

The study was designed to investigate whether an individual’s Big Five personality characteristics (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) were detectable from their activity on Facebook. Specifically, they were interested in "badmouthing" (criticizing superiors and peers), and posting about substance use. The researchers hypothesized that the more an individual badmouthed online, the lower their agreeableness and conscientiousness would be, and individuals who posted about their substance use were expected to be more extroverted and less conscientious.