Psychster Inc. is inviting folks to join a weekly call to a) discuss published articles on the psychology of social media and b) distribute data from our social application and support members' analysis for publication and conference presentations.

Psychster Inc. is a consulting firm that draws on psychological theory to perform research for clients engaged in social computing and social media. To stay current on published articles relevant to the design and success of our clients' ventures, we will discuss a published article each week that is distributed the week prior. Anything from journals in the social or computer sciences is fair game, and we welcome suggestions.

Psychster's own social application, YouJustGetMe.com, is an online laboratory based on the Big Five model of personality where users learn how accurately their online profiles convey their personalities to others. We have recently pulled a comprehensive data set including over 16K self-tests and 26K impressions of others. There is more data than we have time to analyze on such topics as online first-impressions, machine learning/classification, personality, stereotyping, and online identity. We wish to share the data and collaborate with people who have the statistical/analytic skills and the desire to prepare manuscripts for conferences and publication.

If this interests you please send us your name, email, and phone number or Skype account. If you are new to the Psychster network please also send a resume and information about your data-analysis skills. We plan to use Skype conferencing for the calls which is limited to 24 people. We will also invite members to join a Wiki for collaboration and filesharing. The calls will be divided in half for the two purposes above, and members may join or drop off as necessary.

We are pleased to report a certain year-over-year continuity in our research on how accurately people form first-impressions of others from their online profiles on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and a million Ning networks.

Last year at the Int'l Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2008), we presented a paper looking at what you have to say on your profile for visitors to "get" you, that is, see your personality as you see it. Read the full paper here.

This year we return to ICWSM 2009 with a paper looking at what kind of photo you need to post for people to get you. Here's the new paper.

We're starting to understand this issue quite well. Allow me to summarize.

First, some methodology. How do we measure the accuracy of an impression from an online profile? Well, first we built YouJustGetMe.com, which is a fully functional social networking site and Facebook application, but one that asks all members to fill out a personality questionnaire. Then they invite others (friends, dates, and other users who are randomly assigned to them) to try to guess how they answered the same personality questions. Using statistics published by psychologists David Funder and David Kenny, we score the correspondence between the self-rating and the guess. Users immediately get to see that score and discuss it.

With that, the papers we published simply test what elements of the profile best predict higher impression agreement. The first paper tested textual elements. The second paper tested elements of the profile photos.

Before we tell you what we learned, some theory. What are we forming impressions of? Following Goldberg, we believe there are 5 basic personality "domains." They spell OCEAN (Open-Mindedness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, & Neuroticism). Are all the domains easy to read in strangers? No. You see Conscientiousness and Extraversion almost instantly, but it takes longer to read the other domains. Do you need to be face to face? No. You "get" people you see in video, hear on the phone, and (as we've shown) whose profiles you read on Facebook. In fact, a consistent finding is emerging that you see Agreeableness and Neuroticism even better from an online profile than a short ftf interaction. That's right, better.

Here's a great image our co-author and colleage Sam Gosling pulled together to show you what sources of information tell you about what personality traits:

So what do you need to say and show on your profile so others get you?

These textual pieces of information help people get you:

sexual allure (cleavage, come-hither looks)

Of course, what we're testing is whether people's impressions of you agree with your self-impressions. That is, the above elements only affect whether people see you as you see yourself, whether you are accurately conveying your personality through your online profile. We are not testing whether these elements affect how much people like you. For that, we're sure that political leanings, sexual allure, your favorite movie, and your dog might well be important. But so far, it doesn't look like that stuff tells folks who you are.

Why does this matter? Remember these findings when you want to make a dating profile that doesn't give misconceptions about yourself. Think about touching up your profiles that employers see like on LinkedIn or other places. If you design websites, rethink whether you need to make profiles that encourage the cliched "I like books, movies, and long walks on the beach" profile. Those might not be really saying anything.

YouJustGetMe.com just broke 25,000 impressions of others personality. Check it out. And if you have a study idea, contact us. If you crunch numbers, we share data.

For some time, most marketers have agreed that if you want to grow a social media website, or sell stuff through one, a good strategy is to target your offering to "Influentials." If you define Influentials as highly connected people who try stuff out and like to advise others about it all (Keller & Berry, 2003), the thinking has been that these folks are better able to spread an idea than less-connected people.

But targeting Influentials costs money, so it had better work.

Last year, network mathematician and sociologist Duncan Watts together with Peter Dodds (2007) published the results of their computer models of complex networks that questioned this view. Essentially, under a variety of assumptions they found that highly connected people were no more likely than average-connected people to start "cascades," that is, the widespread viral propagation of an idea that ends up being seen by most everyone (like the Facebook explosion, or hush-puppy shoes). Using a forest-fire analogy, Watt & Dodds wrote "no one would claim that the size of a forest fire can be in any way attributed to the exceptional properties of the spark that ignited it." So too, the size of a fad, they found, bears little relation to the popularity of the person who started it.

Watts & Dodds (2007) didn't argue that Influentials don't exist; they concede that they're highly connected and that they try to influence others. But they believe that what's more important is that the ideas get to "easily influenced individuals influencing other easy-to-influence people." Using their forest-fire analogy, they argue "wind, temperature, low humidity, and combustible fuel" are more important to a raging fire/fad than the spark.

Put another way, the subtitle for Keller & Berry's (2003) book is "One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy." Watts is just saying that doesn't mean they listen. Or pass it on. And that's what matters. It's not about Influentials, it's about the Influenceable.

The debate has only begun, and it will likely take years of semantics, modeling, and empiricism to come to a new refined consensus. BUT in the mean time, you can take advantage of this issue to make sure you're not ignoring any strategy you could be taking with your network.

You should be paying attention to all of the below properties of your network to grow or sell stuff, not just a few of them.

1. increase number of people we all pay a lot of attention to this...

2. increase appeal of the idea ...and this

3. increase number of connections between people. We have Keller & Berry to thank for bringing this to our attention. But it's not all...

4. strengthen the connections between people Watts reminds us of this, which is the intimacy or authority of a connection between people determining how often a recommendation from one to the other is heeded

5. lower the threshold for people to forward and Watts reminds us of this, which is the likelihood that a person will consume and, more importantly, recommend an idea on.

6. increase the number of unique people who forward something to you this is how many different people need to recommend something to you before you adopt. I'll visit a website based on one recommendation. But it takes two to get me to try a restaurant, and four to get me to go to a movie.

The slide deck below shows some ways that designers improve each of the above properties of social networks. Here's a quick verbal summary of two of them:

4. strengthen the connections between people ...oddly enough, you do this by encouraging people to reject friend requests from total strangers. If the digital friendships have no real-world counterpart, they're as meaningless as drawing a line between two random names in the phonebook, and those connections sure as heck aren't going to influence each other to act.

5. lower the threshold for people to forward ...obviously, by making it easier for forward for starters....the goal used to be "1-click forwarding" but then Facebook set a new standard "0-click forwarding"...meaning that they unified the click needed for people to consume content and the click needed for them to forward it into the same click...when I add the YouJustGetMe app the link is automatically forwarded to all my friends on the feed.

And the real lesson here is: All of the above network properties are important. Do some surveys or usability testing (maybe with us!) to learn how to turn up the dial on all of them.

I was recently asked to comment on the news story about the online suicide of Abraham Biggs. Although it is clear that Mr. Biggs was a long suffering victim of bipolar depression, and that a taste of the macabre has clearly driven our interest in this story, I think it does Mr. Biggs no dishonor to ask ourselves - what does this incident reveal about social behavior online and about human nature?

Below are the comments that I sent to the reporter in entirety.

A basic assumption of Psychster Inc., our research and consulting firm dedicated to the psychology of social media, is that people are people both online and offline. So we should expect the full array of human tendencies – constructive, destructive, pro-social, anti-social, conservative, and risky - to be expressed in social media as they are in any other arena of social life. That said, some aspects of online environments enable anti-social tendencies more so than historic, face-to-face environments. These relate to your questions.

First, social media allows us to view and even interact with others under the buffer of a computer interface. This produces “de-individuation” (Festinger, 1952; Milgram, 1962; Zimbardo, 1969) which is a sense of psychological distance from others and a loss of personal accountability that can produce radical behaviors. I suspect that the woman who twittered about hurting her child did not feel as much of a sense of personal accountability as she would if she expressed the same thoughts to others face-to-face. Interestingly, de-individuation can happen even if people are not anonymous (like on Facebook where people use their real names) and regardless of the number of onlookers (which explains our shock, for example, that Abraham Biggs would post his tragic video online despite the potential for millions of people to see it.)

Second, social media allows for “many-to-many communication” through features like boards, comments, and blogs. This form of communication is an essential element for “group polarization” to occur (Moscovici & Zavalloni, 1969), which is when people in groups express more radical views than their individual members would in isolation. Those who urged Abraham Biggs on by posting comments that everyone could see were likely responding to group polarization.

Third, social media allows us to spread our name and ideas far more globally than was previously possible. Thus people often use social media to strive for “memetic fitness” (Dawkins, 1989) which is the propagation of one’s ideas in a population almost synonymous with fame. In some circumstances, people will strive to be remembered even at the cost of longevity or children. Unfortunately, radical actions often spread through the internet as far as rare talents or accomplishments, which creates a powerful motivator for people to post them online.

Summary. Others’ radical actions are no less alarming or disturbing when we encounter them online versus anywhere else. And human nature will always perplex and shock us whether it plays out online or offline. But we should realize that some features of social media make a fertile environment for the expression of radial views and behaviors. Social media makes people feel a sense of psychological distance from others. It allows for many-to-many communication which has long been known to make people express radical views. And the internet can can bring people who post radical actions global attention, which creates a strong motivator for them to do so.

The new media for social behavior is like a new volcanic island in the ocean that is being populated by plants and animals – although there will be a slight evolution in how things look and act, the basic form will reflect its origins.

So rather than asking how social media might be changing us, I think a better question is what does social media reveal about us? And the answer, I suspect, will be the same one that the social sciences and humanities have known all along, that we are a mix of both magnanimity and the macabre.

The formula for success - literally. In ad-supported sites, the total number of page views determines the ad inventory you have to sell and thus, the revenue potential of your site. The formula for page views (put in a way you can memorize) is people X checking X clicking. Put more fully, the number of unique visitors each month X the number of times they visit per month X the number of pages they view per visit - equals the number of pages you serve each month.

Checking and clicking matter more than people. Here's the secret of the formula above: increasing checking and clicking increases your page views far more than adding users. For example, in January 2008, MySpace had 59M users who visited on average 11 times each month and viewed 43 pages per visit. Adding 1 more user increased their total page views by 473. That ain't much. But adding 1 more visit by all of their members would increase their page views by 2.5 billion! And if their members viewed just 1 more page each time they visited, it would increase their page views by 650 million - which is more than Facebook, Classmates, Evite and LinkedIn combined!

The simple, powerful psychological way to increase checking and clicking. Psychologists like B.F. Skinner have known since the 1930s how to increase checking and clicking. Because the web didn't exist yet, Skinner applied his lessons to things like slot-machines and fishing. But the application to websites is even clearer. Let me translate the phrasing he might use into language you'll like better:

Skinner would say"Bolster behavior against extinction with a variable interval reinforcement schedule." You read that as: People will repeatedly visit your site if there is an unpredictable amount of time before cool content appears. For example, we don't know how long it will be before a new email arrives, before someone posts a new comment on our Facebook profile, before there's a new bid on our Ebay item, before our movie is available on Netflix, or before breaking news appears on CNN.com. This simple fact makes us check these sites repeatedly. And it makes us continue to check even after longer and longer periods with nothing new. That's the nature of frequency. If your site doesn't already have a feature that operates on a "variable interval" schedule, build one.

Skinner would say "Increase the rate of behavior with a variable ratio reinforcement schedule." You read that as: People will view more pages if there is an unpredictable number of clicks before cool content appears. For example, we don't know how many YouTube videos we will need to watch before we see a really funny one, or how many old friends' profiles we need to read on Facebook until will get some juicy gossip, or how many times we need to play Scrabulous on Facebook until we win, or how many people we need to rate on HotOrNot before we see someone really attractive. So we click on. That's stickiness. Again, if your site doesn't already have a "variable ratio" feature, build one.