Getting to know someone is a lengthy process. You need to spend time with them, observe how they behave and learn their instinctive reactions in different situations. Given these requirements it would appear that your family and friends would be the people who know you best. However scientific research has turned up another contender to the prize.

As per psychologist Youyou Wu and computer scientist Michal Kosinski of the University of Cambridge the computer knows you better than your family or friends. To test this they got David Stillwell, another Cambridge psychologist, to create a Facebook app called myPersonality.

Facebook users gave access to this app for their likes, dislikes, list of friends and also fed in some answers to questions it asked. They were then “rewarded” with an analysis of how they compared with the rest of the myPersonality user population. The app became a viral hit and more than 4 million people worldwide have contributed to this scientific study.

The researchers used human judgement to compare the computer generated analysis of the user’s personality as part of the science project. The computer generated analysis were more accurate than human judgement based on the likes and profile shown to them. The only people who were more accurate in describing the personality of the person than the computer software were their spouces!