The Red and Black

Issue date: 9/23/08 Section: News

CAMPBELL

BUFFARDI

A new University study suggests online social networking sites such as Facebook might be useful tools for detecting whether someone is a narcissist.

"We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others," said lead author Laura Buffardi, a doctoral student in psychology who co-authored the study with associate professor W. Keith Campbell.

The researchers, whose results appear in the October issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, gave personality questionnaires to nearly 130 Facebook users, analyzed page content and had untrained strangers view the pages and rate their impression of the owner's narcissism.

The researchers found the number of Facebook friends and wallposts on profile pages correlates with narcissism.

Buffardi said this is consistent with how narcissists behave in the real-world, with numerous yet shallow relationships.

Untrained observers were able to detect narcissism, too. The researchers found the observers used three characteristics - quantity of social interaction, attractiveness of the individual and the degree of self-promotion in the main photo - to form an impression of the individual's personality.

"People aren't perfect in their assessments," Buffardi said, "but our results show they're somewhat accurate in their judgments."

The tremendous growth of social networking sites has led psychologists to explore how personality traits are expressed online.

Buffardi and Campbell chose Facebook because of popularity among college students.

Because narcissists tend to have more contacts on Facebook, any given Facebook user is likely to have an online friend population with a higher proportion of narcissists than in the real world, he said.

"We've undergone a social change in the last four or five years and now almost every student manages their relationships through Facebook," Campbell said.

- University News Service

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