It probably comes as little surprise to anyone, but a small exploratory study done on 100 college students from a single university suggests that students who score higher on a test of narcissism also spent more time checking and updating their Facebook profile.
Facebook is currently the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. More than 50% of Facebook’s active users log on to Facebook in any given day, while the average user has 130 social connections (what Facebook calls “friends”).
The researcher (Mehdizadeh, 2010) also examined the relationship between narcissism and self-esteem, as well as gender differences in how people use Facebook for self-promotion. “Self-promotion,” according to how it was used in this study, was defined as “any descriptive or visual information that appeared to attempt to persuade others about one’s own positive qualities. ”
Mehdizadeh looked at only five profile features in Facebook: (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. The researcher, rating these items on her own, examined to the extent they were considered self-promoting according to the above definition.
What did the research find?
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Site last updated: 19 May 2013
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I think it’s also an age thing [there are more mature students these days]
I joined ages ago so I could ‘talk’ in real time to my brother in Beijing – luckily we now have Skype.
Check out my articles on PsychCentral.com on narcissism:
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/08/04/how-to-spot-a-narcissist/
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/29/narcissists-who-cry-the-other-side-of-the-ego/
Samuel Lopez De Victoria, Ph.D.
http://www.DrSam.tv
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The best training quote I ever heard was given at a conference on Forensic Psychology. The speaker said, “Everybody is narcissistic. If it doesn’t apply to you, how is it interesting…” We’re all narcissistic. The hope is that we don’t have have a personality disorder- Yikes!
Is it true that spending too much time online may be considered an addiction?
halo….Iam student at Diponegoro University in Indonesia and interested resssearch about facebook and narcistic but I get difficulty to get reference about narcistic could you help me give some refferences about my ressearch, thank you…..