Are you on Facebook? If yes, chances are that you are prone to being narcissistic. This is at least what the BBC reported based on new research. A PhD student, Laura Buffardi and her advisor associate professor W. Keith Campbell from the University of Georgia found in their research that people with Facebook accounts score higher on a scale measuring if you arenarcissist or not. The full research is reported in the academic journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. They gave a personality questionnaire to 130 Facebook users (rather on the small side). In addition to these self-reports, the Facebook sites were coded based on objective and subjective content features. Then the Facebook pages were shown to people from the general public who had to assess the owners narcissism based on different scales.
Â
Â
Those who rated highly on the narcissism scale had more social contacts online and put more self-promoting material online. The researchers found that the number of Facebook friends and the number of wall posts correlate with the measurements of narcissism. Like in other research narcissist were shown to have many friends but not deep relationships.
Â
Â
So Facebook users are self-loving and fall in love with their own reflection on Facebook? One could assume that this is a bad thing. Who wants to be seen as a narcissist after all? However I felt reminded of Granovetter’s strength of weak ties. He argues that people with many but weak relationships can access contacts that are not accessible through strong ties.Narcissism or not, weak ties might be an advantage. In that light it might be interesting to explore scientifically what type of persons are not on Facebook.
