7.2 Brunswikian Facebook Interpretations

For this assignment, I decided I would use the individual-environment links Brunswikian Lens Model to help me analyze the personality of someone random on facebook. To pick the profile I would look at, I just clicked on the friends of my friends until I found one with a lot of information on it. I will call this guy Mr. F.

The four Brunswikian factors for individual-environment links are self-directed identity claims, other-directed identity claims, interior behavioral residue, and exterior behavioral residue. In a networking personal profile such as facebook, the self-directed identity claims are the things a person puts on their profile for their own personal sake. This could be a personal memento, or an inside joke or something else that the average outsider probably would not fully understand. The other-directed identity claim would be something a person puts on their profile that tells something about them aimed at outsiders. The behavioral residues are traces of activity from either the same environment (internal) or an outside environment (external) that can be seen within a person’s profile.

At first glance, it seemed like the majority of the information immediately available in Mr. F’s profile was other-directed claims. Everything in the personal info section would fall under this category. He listed (in great detail) his favorite bands, activities, movies, TV shows, etc. One part of this that gave a hint to an aspect of Mr. F’s personality was that he put “meeting new people” as one of his interests. This means that he probably has a somewhat extroverted personality. It was hard to find any self-directed identity claims in Mr. F’s profile. If I had to take one part of his profile and say it was self-directed, though, I would say that it is the favorite quotes section. A couple of these were philosophical in nature and pointed towards an agreeable personality type. There were other quotes in this section that were transcripts of pieces of conversations Mr. F had with his friends on AIM. These quotes are an example of external behavioral residue because they show interactions he had with other people in an outside environment. Despite the quotes being somewhat funny, they did not help me form any perceptions about Mr. F’s personality. Another form of exterior behavioral residue was the pictures section of Mr. F’s profile. Each picture showed Mr. F in a world that wasn’t facebook, and therefore and external one. The vast majority of these pictures were of Mr. F partying and drinking, and generally having a good time. This furthered the impression I had of him being an extroverted person, since he was always in a crowd of people and apparently having a good time. He had also posted some pictures of him on vacation with his family and an album of him doing volunteer work at a senior citizen community. While the vacation did not help identify any personality factors, the volunteer work made me think Mr. F was more agreeable and maybe open as well. Finally, the most obvious example of internal behavioral residue was in his news feed. This gave traces of past interactions Mr. F had with other people in facebook, such as adding friends and making wall posts. Unfortunately there was nothing much in the news feed that gave me any more impressions about Mr. F’s personality.

Overall, I got the impression that Mr. F was a fairly extroverted person, and probably a little on the agreeable side of things as well. I would say that the best factors to look at when analyzing someone’s profile on facebook would be the behavioral residue factors. Because these are recordings of previous actions, they are less likely to be created by the person for the reason of making themselves look good. They are probably assessment signals, and harder to fake than the conventional signals a person can easily edit in their profile.

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