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- How Happy Are We?
  by Adam D. I. Kramer on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 10:34pm
  UPDATE on Tuesday, March 23, 2010: Data team intern Lisa Zhang expanded our Gross National Happiness index today to English speakers in the UK, Canada and Australia with new graphs for each nation. We applied the same model separately to each of the countries in order to control for cultural differences in how people use language. While this precludes us from determining whether Canadians are happier than Australians or vice versa, we have found a few interesting facts:
  Christmas, New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day are still among the happiest... days for all of these nations, and Friday, Saturday and Sunday are happiest days of the week.
  
  Canadians are happier the day before Canadian Thanksgiving (a Sunday) than on the actual Canadian Thanksgiving Day (a Monday).
  
  Australia's index was lowest on Feb. 13, 2008—the day Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized in Parliament to indigenous Australians—reflecting the 4 percent of Aussie status updates containing the word "sorry."
  
  Happiness levels in the UK seem to have the least variation, with the fewest large peaks among all the graphs due to holidays.
  As before, we analyzed the number of positive and negative words in English status updates for these nations. This was done on anonymous data, and no one at Facebook read any of the actual status messages. Read more about the research from our data team.
  
  Originally Published Monday, Oct. 5, 2009
  Every day, through Facebook status updates, people share how they feel with those who matter most in their lives. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing. They're brief, to the point, and descriptive of what's going on this week, today or right now.
  
  Grouped together, these updates are indicative of how we are collectively feeling. At Facebook, we're always looking for ways to help people better understand the world around them, and we're interested in how people express their emotions with one other and the world. So earlier this year, data scientists at Facebook started a project to measure the overall mood of people from the United States on Facebook, based on the sentiment expressed in status updates.
  
  The result was an index that measures how happy people on Facebook are from day-to-day by looking at the number of positive and negative words they're using when updating their status. When people in their status updates use more positive words—or fewer negative words—then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual.
  
  Though more countries or languages may be added later, the current result is notable since it is based on the updates of all English-speaking U.S. Facebook users. In this sense, it can count as an indicator of "Gross National Happiness," a metric only measured currently via Gallup polls and national surveys in countries such as France and Bhutan. To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research; instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed.
  
  For our Gross National Happiness index, we adapted a collection of positive and negative emotion words built by social psychologists. Examples of positive or happy words include "happy," "yay" and "awesome," while negative, or unhappy words, include "sad," "doubt" and "tragic." We also did a brief survey of some Facebook users, which showed that people who use more positive words, relative to the number of negative words, reported higher satisfaction with their lives.
  
  Over time, we've seen spikes in the index for different days of the year. Some of the happiest days include U.S. national holidays like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July, social holidays like Halloween and religious holidays including Christmas and Easter. Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008—when the U.S. was celebrating the election of President Barack Obama—was over twice as happy as the average Wednesday.
  
  It's not all rosy, though: The index also shows two remarkably unhappy days. The lowest was Jan. 22, 2008, which was the day the Asian stock market crashed and coincidentally the same day as the tragic death of actor Heath Ledger. The recent death of cultural icon Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009, came in as the second least happy day in the past two years.
  
  How happy will all of us be tomorrow, on our birthdays or during the World Cup? It depends on you and what you decide to share about how you're feeling with your friends through your status updates.
  
  Adam, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at the University of Oregon and an intern on Facebook's data team, is 72 percent happier than the average person on Facebook.
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- Topics: Research, Status Updates
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- Connecting with... Sam Gosling: Facebook Psychologist
  by Adam D. I. Kramer on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 12:56pm
  At Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people—from experts in their field, academics and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook Blog in our "Connecting with...." series. I had the opportunity to speak with Sam Gosling, professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin and author of "Snoop: What your stuff says about you." He recently published research that found that people are expressing their real personalities on social networks like... Facebook, rather than inflated takes on themselves.
  
  Gosling
  What made you interested in researching the psychology behind people's profile on Facebook and social networking generally?
  I think it was a confluence of two different forces. First, I had already done a lot of research on how you can look at people's physical spaces as reflections of what people are like and how people use that physical space to communicate messages to others and make them feel certain ways. …It just seemed quite a natural extension to apply this approach to a virtual space…
  
  Second, so many people are on the social networking sites. And although from the outside their activities may appear frivolous, they clearly aren't because so many people devote so much time and psychological energy to them.
  
  So you found that people are in fact reflecting their real personalities in their Facebook profiles, is that correct?
  That's correct. We found that judgments of people based on nothing but their Facebook profiles correlate pretty strongly with our measure of what that person is really like, and that measure consists of both how the profile owner sees him or herself and how that profile owner's friends see the profile owner. The combination of those self and friend-based ratings corresponded pretty strongly with the judgments made by strangers.
  
  Why do you think people actually are being their true selves online, even though they could just present whoever they'd like to be seen as?
  Well, it's not clear that many of the people could just present how they would like to be seen. I think there are a number of obstacles to doing that. So, one of the obstacles is really knowing how to be different.
  
  I can see my colleague's office, which is immaculate, and I can see my office, which is messy. So if I went into her office, I could pull one of the journals a quarter of an inch from the bookshelf and she would notice that right away and push it back, whereas you could mess up my books, put them on their sides, take some out and put them in the wrong shelves and I wouldn't notice for a few months. It's very, very hard to fake those differences in perception...
  
  Another reason why it's hard to fake is that you'd have to consistently and persistently do things in order to be a seen certain way. So if I wanted to pretend to be much nicer than I really am, it's not just half an hour [of] really focusing on it. You've only got to slip up once or twice for you to completely negate that: You've only got to, you know, do something really mean to someone for that impression to go, for example.
  
  If I want to appear to be a sensation seeker [and] be seen as somebody who "swims with the sharks," then I actually have to go swimming with the sharks in order to have photos of me swimming with the sharks. I can't just create a picture of me scuba diving, I have to really do it... There is accountability there because if I claim to be someone who enjoys swimming with the sharks, my friends in the real world would say, "No you don't, you're totally scared of sharks."
  
  So the next question is a little more broad: How do you think that the Internet has changed our sense of identity overall?
  I think that's a very good question... Once cultures became industrialized that resulted in people segmenting their social audiences because they would leave home and go to work and then perhaps go to another venue, or audience, to engage in leisure activities. I think these developments allowed people to develop different identities: I will have a home or family self, a friend self, a leisure self, a work self. We were able to have all of these different selves and maintain those things quite separately. And it's quite common right now to have people from work who know nothing about your home life and vice versa.
  
  As these new technologies emerge, they are for the first time now bringing those identities together. On my Facebook profile, I have colleagues, I have family members, I have students, I have people who've read my book, I have all kinds of different people there and it's much harder now to maintain that separation. So I think one of the things we are being forced to do is accept the merging of identities that we may have tried to keep apart before. So as a professor, I may not want people to think that I go out and have a few drinks occasionally, but now I have to find a way to reconcile my professor self with my having-a-few-drinks self.
  
  Plus at the same time, if everybody sees that everybody is doing that, they might come to terms with it a little bit better so that they don't find it quite so scandalous?
  Absolutely. I certainly agree with you. I think that is happening. I think we're now accepting that just because you see your accountant going out on weekends and attending clown conventions, that no longer makes you think that he's not a good accountant. We're coming to terms and reconciling with that merging of identities.
  
  Would you say that sharing is basically the same when you're doing it on purpose? In social media, all of the sharing that people do is sort of intentional; it's on purpose, as opposed to in a more naturalistic context where you may happen to say something and then even regret it or forget that [you] shared that.
  Yes, I think you're right, and I think one of the other things that we're having to face up to is that in our normal social interactions, we may be deliberately sharing things but under the guise of letting them [out] accidentally—"Oh did I mention, I just go back from Monaco?" or something like that.
  
  And now, of course, because you deliberately do these things, I think sort of the norms of "letting things slip" and the other ways we might try to communicate deliberately [while] pretending they are not deliberate are changing too... When you first see these things [in social media] it looks very unusual in terms of people showing off about all the cool things they have done. Yet, they have always done that and they just kind of did it in a different way.
  
  So what's next? Are you planning any future research into people's Facebook personalities?
  We are trying to look in a bit more detail right now in terms of which elements people use when they are forming impressions of others. Which ones should they use, which ones have they been neglecting that they shouldn't? Which ones are they wrongly using [and] which ones actually are diagnostic of what people are like? Also [we're] trying to look at how information changes and how preferences may be communicated amongst people.
  
  So, for example, with people becoming friends—looking at what we can learn about friendship, say, with the sharing of preference information. If you and I become friends and then you suddenly "like" all the music that I have "liked," what does that say about our friendship? Or, if we share more equally, what does that say about our friendship? Or if we never share. So [we are] beginning to look at Facebook interactions as indexes of these social processes.
  
  Adam is a Ph.D. student in social psychology at the University of Oregon and an intern on Facebook's data team.
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- Topics: Connecting with..., Research
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