If you have too many friends on sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, the hot new Pinterest, or similar social networks, you could be a self-absorbed exhibitionist tending toward narcissism.
Christopher Carpenter, a professor of communication at Western Illinois University, in his study “Narcissism on Facebook: Self-promotional and Anti-social Behavior,” suggests social media sites like Facebook offer a lot of opportunities for individuals to reveal their dark side, trying to self-promote and assuage wounded egos.
Facebook “offers a gateway for hundreds of shallow relationships and emotionally detached communication”, as does other social media shown in the study, Carpenter says.
He defines narcissism as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and an exaggerated sense of self-importance.”
Carpenter published his study in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, showing that people using social media sites with more self-esteem have fewer antisocial behaviors. The study also revealed that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.
Social media users with narcissistic characteristics responded more aggressively to derogatory comments made about them on the social networking site's public walls, also changing their profile pictures more often.
For most narcissists, Facebook "offers a gateway for hundreds of shallow relationships and emotionally detached communication," the professor continues. More importantly, social networking in general allows the user a great deal of control over how he or she is presented to and perceived by peers and other users.
Carpenter used surveys that measured self-promoting Facebook behaviors among 292 individuals for the study, using the narcissistic personality inventory (NPI), which includes the grandiose exhibitionism (GE) subscale and the entitlement or exploitativeness (EE) subscale to measure anti-social behavior. Of the respondents, seventy-five percent were college students.
The professor explaines the GE subscale includes vanity, superiority, exhibitionistic tendencies and self-absorption while EE encompasses a sense of deserving respect and a willingness to manipulate and take advantage of others.
The study showed exactly what Carpenter had hypothesized – GE behaviors on Facebook correlated with self-promotion and exhibitionism and exploitative tendencies on social media correlated with anti-social behaviors.
“If Facebook is to be a place where people go to repair their damaged ego and seek social support, it is vitally important to discover the potentially negative communication one might find on Facebook and the kinds of people likely to engage in them. Ideally, people will engage in pro-social Facebooking rather than anti-social me-booking”, Carpenter said.
The study showed grandiose exhibitionism correlated with self-promotion, entitlement and exploitativeness correlated with anti-social behaviors on Facebook and similar social sites. Self-esteem seems to be unrelated to self-promotion behavior. In fact, self-esteem was related to less of these anti-social behaviors.
More study is needed to understand that good, the bad and the ugly of social media, particularly how they contribute to aggressive and narcissistic behavior. This study is the first to show a direct correlation between social networking and any narcissistic personality disorder.
Thought the results of the research show that a recent study from the American Psychological Association showing young adults today are more materialistic and care little about the environment or politics than past generations was on target, it is still to early to draw a connection between the two studies.
"In general, the 'dark side' of Facebook requires more research in order to better understand Facebook's socially beneficial and harmful aspects in order to enhance the former and curtail the latter," Carpenter concluded.
Written By: Tom RetterbushEmail: tomretterbush@gmail.com
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