The L.A. Times reports on a study about how people present themselves on social networking sites:
A prevailing theory in psychology has been that people use their social-networking pages to protect an idealized version of themselves, not the person they really are. That may not be so.
[A] study, published recently in the journal Psychological Science, showed that peoples’ profiles do reflect their true selves. It was easiest to authenticate such personality traits as extroversion and openness from social-networking pages, somewhat harder to gauge neuroticism. But, overall, people didn’t idealize their Facebook selves, as some researchers had suspected they might.
Read the rest here.