Narcissism and implicit attention seeking: Evidence from linguistic analyses of social networking and online presentation

By C. Nathan DeWall, Laura E. Buffardi, Ian Bonser, W. Keith Campbell. 2011

182 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Two studies examined how narcissism, a personality trait marked by self-promotion, vanity, and grandiosity, related to how people communicate information about themselves online. We predicted that narcissists communicate in ways that draw attention to themselves. Specifically, we predicted that narcissistic people who used relatively few first-person singular pronouns (e.g., ‘‘I,’’ and ‘‘me’’) would display more self-promoting and sexy images of themselves on their Facebook.com profile pages (Study 1) and would use more profane and aggressive words in an online self-descriptive task (Study 2). Both studies supported this hypothesis. Implications for narcissism and online communication research are discussed.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e6428bad9e9c605907aade320fb1af5cfe608df2

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Citations in the corpus

Mirror or Megaphone?: How relationships between narcissism and social networking site use differ on Facebook and Twitter (2013, background): “Others have suggested positive associations between narcissism and measures of some quality or aspect of use by conducting linguistic analyses of profile pages (DeWall et al., 2011) and semiotic analyses of photos (Mendelson & Papacharissi, 2011).”
Twitter versus Facebook: Exploring the role of narcissism in the motives and usage of different social media platforms (2014, background): “Unlike Facebook, few empirical investigations have been conducted using Twitter (e.g., Chen, 2011; Hughes et al., 2012; McKinney et al., 2012; Panek et al., 2013).”
“Let Me Take a Selfie”: Associations Between Self-Photography, Narcissism, and Self-Esteem (2017, background): “Other evidence suggests that narcissism is associated with more exhibitionistic or attention-seeking posts on Facebook (Carpenter, 2012), including self-referential statements or updates and more frequent location check-ins (DeWall et al., 2011; Wang & Stefanone, 2013).”
Is Facebook creating "iDisorders"? The link between clinical symptoms of psychiatric disorders and technology use, attitudes and anxiety (2013, background): “…scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory predicted higher self-promotion on social networking sites (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008) as well as more use of personal pronouns such as I and me along with more self-promoting photos on Facebook pages (DeWall, Buffardi, Bonser, & Campbell, 2011).”