A picture is worth a thousand words, but what about a selfie? According to a new study, clues to a person's personality are encoded in a selfie -- clues that can be gleaned by artificial intelligence.

Computer models, with only a selfie to go by, proved better in tests at predicting a person's personality than human raters.

Studies have shown links between facial features and traits such as aggressiveness and risk-taking. However, the latest neuroscience research suggests that the human brain doesn't process individual facial features. Instead, the brain processes faces holistically.

To study links between personality and holistic facial features, such as facial symmetry and height-to-length ratio, researchers in Russia turned to artificial intelligence.

A team of scientists trained a system of artificial neural networks to analyze photographs of human faces and make personality judgments. To do this, they used the results of previous studies that showed connections between certain facial characteristics and personality traits.

Scientists used their model to analyze the photos of 12,000 volunteers who filled out a personality survey and sent in a selfie. Participants rated themselves on a scale for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, called the Big Five traits.

When analyzing the faces of two individuals, the computer model made a correct personality comparison -- predicting which persons reported themselves as more extroverted or dominant, for example -- 58 percent of the time, a value above that of chance.

The new research, published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, showed conscientiousness was the easiest personality trait to recognize by looking at a person's face.

"We circumvented the reliability limitations of human raters by developing a neural network and training it on a large data set labelled with self-reported Big Five traits," researchers wrote in their paper.

Authors of the new paper suggest the artificial intelligence models developed for the study could be used to analyze online dating profiles.

"Given that partner personality and match between two personalities predict friendship formation, long-term relationship satisfaction, and the outcomes of dyadic interaction in unstructured settings, the aid of artificial intelligence in making partner choices could help individuals to achieve more satisfying interaction outcomes," researchers wrote.

Related Links
All About Human Beings and How We Got To Be Here

Tweet

Thanks for being here; We need your help. The Space Media Network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain. With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords. Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year. If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceMediaNetwork Contributor $5 Billed Once credit card or paypal		SpaceMediaNetwork Monthly Supporter $5 Billed Monthly paypal only

Brazil tribe facing 'genocide': rights group
Sao Paulo (AFP) May 19, 2020
An indigenous group in Brazil that traditionally has no contact with the outside world is suffering a "genocide" because of illegal loggers' encroachment on their land, a rights group said Monday. The Awa Guaja, a hunter-gatherer tribe of around 400 people in the Amazon rainforest, has lost huge tracts of land to deforestation in recent years, making them struggle to find food, said a statement from the indigenous rights group Forest Guardians. "If you don't put an end to the invasions of our te ... read more