Can you judge a person by her Facebook cover?

Is an online persona a good judge of a person’s mental health or character? That question was raised after a Canadian woman on sick leave for depression lost her benefits—not because of anything she did in person, but because her insurance agent found photos of her on Facebook in which she appeared to be having fun.

People getting in trouble from what they post on social networking sites has been in the media a lot. However, in more typical cases, a person might call in sick and then very obviously post a status that they are at Disney World—clearly leading to consequences at his or her employer. Not only was the woman in this situation being judged on less concrete Facebook evidence, but the insurance company was judging a mental health condition, which isn’t exactly concrete to begin with. In fact, one could argue that someone who is mentally unstable might be more likely to be living it up at a party.

So just how much does your Facebook page say about who you really are? We often say that our online persona is not the real us, but the funny thing is, it just might be. The psychology blog Cognitive Daily recently reported about a study that found correlations between the behaviors of people online and in person. The study found that a person’s likeability, expressivity and disclosure habits were correlated online and in person.

However, one difference between the digital and real is that online expressivity is strongly correlated with online likability but not in-person likability. (Interpretation: Being expressive online might make you friends on the Web, but not necessarily anywhere else.) The blog notes that spontaneity is also hard to judge: “A Facebook page might have been carefully crafted over many hours, but other online interactions like tweets and status updates can be much more spur-of-the-moment. It's less clear whether this behavior is related to real-life spontaneity.”

That last revelation brings us back to judging someone’s health. An online persona is carefully crafted enough that it might often be easy not to reveal something embarrassing like depression. While someone’s online persona might very well be a good glance into who they are, it is still a more crafted version that might not be the best measure of someone’s health or character. But, like it or not, a persona’s online persona will continue to play a bigger factor in who people judge you to be.