Narcissistic Personality Inventory (FB)

Social networking sites such as Facebook are prevalent in today’s technological society. Facebook (FB) provides individuals a platform for self-expression and connecting with friends and family across the world. However, narcissists use this platform as a mean for self-promotion to large audiences. An explanation of narcissism as a personality trait, narcissistic behavior on FB, impressions that other individuals hold about narcissists and grandiose narcissism will be presented to support that narcissistic behavior on FB has an impact on online relationships. A narcissist is an individual who has a grandiose and inflated self-concept of him or herself (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008). For instance, narcissists believe that they are the most attractive

The participants completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), which is a 40-item questionnaire that measures the degree of narcissism, with a high score indicating a highly narcissistic individual (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008). After filling out the NPI, researchers gave participants five FB profiles of random strangers to view and rate on 37 different personality traits (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008). The FB profiles were obtained from 129 undergraduate students who were between 18 and 23 years old. The FB profiles were coded by researchers for the number of friends, wall posts, member of different FB groups, and lines found in the “About me” section. After collecting the participant’s impressions on the random FB profiles, researchers found that there was a positive association between narcissism and the degree of attractiveness, sexiness and self-promotion displayed in the profile picture (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008). It is important to note, that the effect size of this research finding is small and a larger sample size is necessary to establish a larger effect size. Additionally, participants rated narcissists as more agentic (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008). Therefore, providing support that narcissists are perceived as more agentic compared to those low in narcissism. The research

Researchers had 155 undergraduate students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison fill out questionnaires regarding narcissism, demographic information and FB usage (Choi, Panel, Nardis & Toma, 2015). Researchers asked the participant to friend the research team temporarily on FB in order to gain access to their FB profile. Once the participant agreed, they completed the NPI. Then, the participant’s FB profile was downloaded and coded by research assistants for the total number of FB statuses, comments and likes received during the past two weeks prior to the research study. The research findings were that individuals who were high in narcissism actually received less comments and likes compared to individuals low in narcissism (Choi et al., 2015). The research limitation to this study is no clear method of knowing whether individuals who did not like or comment on the narcissistic FB profile did so because of annoying content, holding ill feelings towards the individual or simply not having seen the