Rm Compiet Kris

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Narcissism on Facebook

Appearance and evaluation of narcissistic Facebook behavior

Kris Compiet

5740614

Thesis research Master Communication Science

Graduate School of Communication

University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Sindy SumterDate: June 11, 2013


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Preface

This thesis is conducted in order to graduate from the Research Master Communication

Science at the University of Amsterdam. Therefore, two studies were conducted and are presented as two individual academic papers. The first study concerns how narcissism is

prevalent on Facebook and is in preparation for submission to the journal Cyberpsychology,

Behavior and Social Networking. For this reason, the references and further lay out of the

paper is conform the norms of this journal. The APA rules are applied in the second paper,

concerning the evaluation of narcissism on Facebook by others.

I would like to thank my supervisor Sindy Sumter for her constructive feedback in the past

year. In enjoyed the whole process of writing this thesis a lot, partly due to her never ending

enthusiasm. Thanks to her, I am now graduating as a research master student instead of a

regular master student. I also would like to thank Helen Vossen for her feedback and her great

contribution to the paper of the first study, which will hopefully be published someday soon.


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Table of Contents

Study 1 Narcissism and Facebook behavior: craving admiration and expecting respect. ....... 7

Abstract ................................................................................................................................... 8

Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 9

Method .................................................................................................................................. 13

Results .................................................................................................................................. 14

Discussion ............................................................................................................................. 15

References ............................................................................................................................ 18

Tables .................................................................................................................................... 20

Appendix A ........................................................................................................................... 23

10-item Facebook Behavior Scale .................................................................................... 23

Appendix B ........................................................................................................................... 25

Subscales Narcissism Personality Inventory Scale ........................................................... 25

Study 2 Recognition and evaluation of narcissistic behavior on Facebook ........................... 27

Abstract ................................................................................................................................. 28

Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 29

Method .................................................................................................................................. 33

Results .................................................................................................................................. 35

Discussion ............................................................................................................................. 40

References ............................................................................................................................ 44

Appendix 1 ........................................................................................................................... 46

Questionnaire .................................................................................................................... 46

Appendix 2 ........................................................................................................................... 48

Stimulus materials ............................................................................................................. 48


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Study 1

Narcissism and Facebook behavior: cravingadmiration and expecting respect.

Journal: Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking

Keywords: narcissism, Facebook, emerging adults.

Authors: Compiet, K., Sumter, S.R. & Vossen, H.G.M.

Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Word count: 2707

Author note

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to S.R. Sumter, Amsterdam

School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012

CX Amsterdam, the Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected], Tel: 0031-205257174, Fax:

0031-20-5253681


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Abstract

The present study examined how two aspects of trait narcissism, Grandiose

Exhibitionism (GE) and Entitlement and Exploitativeness (EE), are related to Facebook

behaviors in a Dutch sample. GE relates to the desire to be in the center of attention, whereas

EE refers to manipulative traits. Two hundred eighty seven emerging adults, aged 17 to 27

years, completed an online survey assessing different Facebook behaviors and personality

characteristics, including narcissism, need for popularity, self-esteem and life satisfaction.

Results showed that both GE and EE have unique relationships with Facebook behaviors.

Emerging adults with higher levels of GE used Facebook more frequently, had a larger online

community on Facebook and were more likely to use the social network site for self-

promoting purposes in their status updates, profile information and pictures compared to peers

with low levels of GE. Moreover, emerging adults who scored high on EE were more likely to

accept strangers as friends and were more likely to retaliate against negative feedback. These

results provide evidence for how two aspects of trait narcissism are related to specific

Facebook behaviors.


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Introduction

With over 1 billion active users worldwide 1, Facebook has gained a prominent place in

the lives of many emerging adults. Emerging adults, youngsters between 17-27 years old, are

constructing their own identity, are self-focused and place great importance on their peer

group. 2 For this reason, Facebook can be considered particularly attractive for this specific

age group. Through Facebook, emerging adults can expand or strengthen their social capital,

which reflects the resources that become available through your social network. 3 Social

capital has several beneficial effects, for example better health, academic success and better

quality of life. 4

Although Facebook use can be considered beneficial, there may also be negative

consequences. For instance, the increased usage of social network sites like Facebook,

coinci des with the observation that todays emerging adults are increasingly narcissistic. 5 6 In

this light, some researchers emphasize that Facebook enables self-promoting behavior and

maintenance of an excessively large network; characteristics which are associated with

narcissistic personality traits. 7 These authors argue that Facebook contributes to emerging

adults becoming more narcissistic, and thus engaging in more narcissistic behavior both

offline and online. 7

One reason to worry about increasing narcissism is that offline narcissism has been

linked to negative outcomes, e.g. poor relationships, hampered identity development and

poor career chances. 8 Consequently, we expect that emerging adults who engage in online

narcissistic behaviors could be at risk to suffer similar negative consequences. Online

narcissistic behaviors might be especially detrimental, as these behaviors are visible to a wide

audience and are virtually inerasable. Before the social consequences of narcissism on

Facebook can be investigated, it is important to further specify the relationship between


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Facebook and narcissism. For this reason, we investigated which Facebook behaviors are

related to narcissism, and can thus be considered online expressions of narcissism .

Narcissism

In the present study, narcissism is viewed as a personality trait that individuals can

possess in varying degrees and which occurs on a continuum. 9 Narcissistic personality

disorder represents the extreme end of this continuum. Narcissists 1 have an inflated self-image

and believe that they are special and unique. Furthermore, they are good at understanding the

emotions of others (cognitive empathy) but are not affected by them (affective empathy),therefor they can easily manipulate others. 10 Whereas narcissists crave attention and

admiration, this lack of affective empathy often stands in the way of intimate relationships. 9

Males are known to be more narcissistic than females. 11 In addition, male narcissists are more

likely to display grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and excessive need for admiration to

establish their uniqueness, whereas female narcissists overinvest in (significant) others. 12

Narcissism is sometimes wrongly seen as the equivalent of high self-esteem. While

narcissists feel superior and will report high levels of self-esteem, their self-image is unstable

and contingent on their environment. 8 As a result, they will feel threatened and respond

aggressively when their self-image is questioned by others. 13 For this reason, studies on

narcissism should always control for self-esteem.

1In the present study the term narcissists is used to describe emerging adults who score relatively high onmeasures of narcissism.


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Narcissists and Facebook behavior

Previous studies have shown that narcissists spend more time on Facebook, have more

Facebook friends, were more likely to accept friendship requests from strangers, had a positive attitude towards having a lot of Facebook friends and looked more for social support

on Facebook. 7 9 14 16 Moreover, narcissists also used Facebook more for self-promotion than

non-narcissists, by means of pictures, profile information and status updates. 7 9 15 17 They post

more attractive pictures of themselves, sometimes edited in Photoshop, 15 and believe that

others are interested in what they are doing. 9 Because narcissists self -esteem is constantly

under great pressure, they can act defensively when their self-image is undermined by others.

To protect their self-image, narcissists were found to monitor Facebook more often for

comments about themselves and were more likely to react aggressively when they

encountered negative comments. 14 In addition, individuals high in narcissism provided less

social support than they sought on Facebook. 14

Although the studies described above demonstrate a consistent relation between

narcissism and Facebook use, some critical issues can be raised. First, because of the lack of a

standardized measure for the use of social network sites, most studies have developed their

own measure of Facebook use. Often no reliability or validity statistics are provided for these

measures. Carpenter (2012) did provide reliability statistics and results from confirmatory

factor analysis for his Facebook use measures, however not for the entire scale. To further the

field, it is crucial that measures used to assess Facebook behaviors are validated in different

samples. For this reason, the current study will validate the entire scale developed by

Carpenter (2012) and investigate its psychometric properties. 14 The scale will be expanded to

cover a broader range of Facebook behavior.


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Second, the studies described above mostly studied narcissism as a unitary construct in

relation to Facebook behaviors. However, Ackerman and colleagues distinguish three

dimensions of which two are maladaptive; Grandiose Exhibitionism (GE) and Entitlement and

Exploitativeness (EE). 18 Individuals who score high on GE, desire to be in the center of

attention, cannot stand being ignored and want to promote themselves. 18 They are vain, feel

superior to others and have exhibitionistic tendencies. Individuals who score high on EE

expect respect from others, without feeling the obligation for reciprocity. They manipulate

and take advantage of others to achieve their individual goals. 18 To the best of our knowledge,

only one study has investigated how different dimensions of narcissism are linked to

Facebook behavior, namely Carpenter. 14 Replication is needed to validate these findings and

therefor our second aim is to investigate whether the two dimensions of narcissism have

unique relationships with Facebook behaviors. We specifically expect that Facebook

behaviors aimed to attain an audience as large as possible and Facebook behavior aimed at

self-promotion, is most strongly related to GE. Whereas, Facebook behaviors aimed at

protecting narcissists self -image and controlling others is expected to be more strongly

related to EE.

Furthermore, although most studies corrected for self-esteem to rule out the potential of

spurious effects, they ignore other variables that are known to relate to Facebook use or

narcissism, such as need for popularity and life satisfaction. 19 In the present study these two

variables are included as covariables.

Finally, as many studies are conducted among US samples 6 7 9 14 or non-representative

samples (e.g. college or university students) 6 7 9 14 15 , external validity is limited. Our study

uses an European (Dutch) sample with a wider distribution of age, gender and educational

level.


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Number of friends, 9) Accepting strangers as friends and 10) Retaliation against negative

feedback. The reliability, number of items, rating scale and example item for each subscale

can be found in Table 1. Furthermore, the full scale is included as an Appendix. To determine

the construct validity of the scale, we conducted a Confirmatory Factor Analysis using

AMOS21. The original 10-factor model fitted the data adequately (CFI = .79, RMSEA = .07

90% CI [.06, .07]). However, we allowed errors to correlate within four subscales: Facebook

use, self-promotion with pictures, self-promotion and social support seeking (see Appendix A

for the items in the subscales). Hereafter, the model fit improved, X (737) = 1628.10, p

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