Narcissism on Facebook

In normal every day life with face to face contact the physical characteristics and knowledge about social background form the identity of your contact. It’s stable and three dimensional. You know that person, it’s therefor very difficult for the other to claim another identity or create impressions inconsistent with how you know him or her. Online identity is a different topic. You can create ideal identities not necessarily overlapping your real identity. It’s a controlled setting in which you can create different identities from the person you really are. Moreover, from research it has been shown that people act differently in social networking environments when compared to those interacting in anonymous settings. Online self representation can vary according to the nature of the setting.

What is the relationship between offline personality and online self representation on facebook?

A recent study looked at the effects of narcissism and self esteem on online social activity and self promotion. The researchers included 50 male and 50 female facebook owners, they were randomly recruited at York university, their age ranged from 18 to 25 years. The facebook pages were rated and the participants took 4 questionnaires about demographic information, facebook activity, self esteem (the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale) and narcissism (the Narcissism Personality Inventory).

Five features of the Facebook page were coded for the extent to which they were self-promoting: (a) the About Me section, (b) the Main Photo, (c) the first 20 pictures on the View Photos of Me section, (d) the Notes section, and (e) the Status Updates section.

Self promotion was distinguished as any descriptive or visual informationthat appeared to attempt to persuade others about one’s own positive qualities. For instance posting ‘‘My Celebrity Look-alikes”. Use of picture enhancement etc.

They found a strong relationship between narcissism and lower self esteem with greater facebook activity as well as more promotional self content. Gender did not influence these relationships.

This is another study implying that narcissism can be detected in facebook, the previous study is also discussed on this blog: The Dangers of Facebook. Gender differences were found in another study but on risk taking attitudes. Men with profiles on social networking sites are higher in risk taking behavior and less worried about privacy issues compared to women.

In research looking at other personality factors, the Big Five was used amongst facebook users. As discussed in a previous post on this blog: personality factors are not as influential as expected on using Facebook. The Big Five is probably not a very good instrument to investigate personality traits and facebook use.

Mehdizadeh, S. (2010). Self-Presentation 2.0: Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 13 (4), 357-364 DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2009.0257