The relevance of social psychology in the studies of the digital ecosystems

We are all familiar with the benefits that the new era of digital networking has brought us. The facilitated communication, connection with friends, sharing our moments with the people we care with, but also expressing compassion with others shared moments, photos, ideas. The whole meaning of the word comunication has changed.

Researchers have long measured people’s thoughts, feelings, and personalities using survey questions. The wide spread use of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks has afforded new approaches to social science research to analyze and interpret data using computer science methods. These techniques allow researchers the ability to understand characteristics about the person from large-scale data sets.

So nowadays the big data of information that we’re sharing by our own will, are making the social psychologist job lot easier. They can evaluate the personality of the user by many shared data like for example their statuses, likes, pictures, their tweets and the language they’re using etc. This has become also very useful for the marketing researches in profiling the needs of the customer.

But the this opens also an other question: are we aware that pressing like on a Facebook group gives a meaning about our personality and how honest are our communication and expressions via social networks?