Study: Your Facebook "likes" reveal more than you think

Attention Facebook users: Do you “like” Mozart, science, “The Colbert Report” and curly fries? Chances are you’ve got a high IQ. Have you clicked the thumbs-up icon for Tyler Perry, Harley-Davidson and Lady Antebellum? Perhaps you’re not quite as cerebral.

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What you endorse on the popular social media website may say a whole lot more about you than you intended, researchers from the University of Cambridge in Britain have found. You may not think twice about your fondness for NASCAR, “The Bachelor” and Oklahoma State University, but those affirmations fit the pattern of a person who’s conservative and less open to new things, they reported Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Even traits that users of social networks may not want to broadcast — including smoking behavior, drug use or sexuality — can be sussed out pretty accurately by their patterns of likes, the researchers found after combing through data from 58,466 Facebook members in the U.S. More than a quarter of regular Facebook users click the like button for content they find there.

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