12 March 2013

Most of us are on Facebook, and most of us have 'liked' pages on Facebook - either for trivial or pragmatic purposes.
Sometimes it's to tailor our online presence, sometimes it's to keep updated on our favourite items, while other times it's a fleeting meme.

Some of you may have read about the recent study from the University of Cambridge where they analysed people's 'like' habits. They collected data on 58,000 Americans (a huge sample space) and attempted to find a relationship between their Facebook 'likes' and their personal characteristics.

The results were very, very impressive.
By looking at only a person's liked pages, they were able to ascertain:

• Gender with 93% accuracy
• Differentiation between Caucasian and African-American with 95% accuracy
• Sexuality with 75%-88% accuracy
• Relationship status with 67% accuracy
• Differentiation between Christians and Muslims with 82% accuracy

These statistics are staggering - not only for stalkers, but for marketing firms.

They were also able to compile a list of 'likes' that were frequent in high and low IQ respondents.

For instance, intelligent people were highly likely to like 'The Godfather', 'Morgan Freeman's Voice' and 'Curly Fries'.

Lower intelligence respondents had a higher propensity of likes for things like 'Harley Davidson', 'Bebe', and my personal favourite, 'I Love Being a Mum'.

The page also contains a list of most-liked items for some other categories above, like gays, lesbians, republicans etc.

Today's Daily Quota is a link to the survey itself, which has proved very difficult to find in the mainstream media. It includes a full list of the high and low IQ 'likes', as well as the raw data.

Hopefully The Daily Quota was up there somewhere.

READ IT HERE