Narcissism and social networking

Around 100 million people now use the social-networking site Facebook. Researchers at the University of Georgia looked into the links between people's Facebook page and their personality, and, in particular, how the content of people's pages correlated with the personality trait of narcissism. Narcissists are superficially charming people who often end up using people for their own advantage and who have difficulty in forming healthy long-term relationships. They often hurt the people around them and hurt themselves in the long run. The study administered questionnaires to nearly 130 Facebook users, analyzed the content of their pages and asked untrained strangers to view their pages and rate their impression of the owner's narcissism. The study found that the number of friends and wall posts a person had correlated with narcissism reflecting the fact that narcissists tend to have numerous but shallow relationships. The untrained observers used quantity of social interaction, attractiveness of the individual and the degree of self-promotion in their profile picture to rate people's narcissism and were fairly accurate in their judgements. Narcissists were also more likely to choose glamorous, self-promoting photos as their profile picture, whereas other people tended to choose snap shots.

You can find out more about this research at

http://psychcentral.com/news/2008/09/23/social-networking-ids-narcissism/2988.html