خودشیفتگی و جلب توجه ضمنی: شواهدی از تجزیه و تحلیل زبانی شبکه های اجتماعی و ارائه آنلاین

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.

Each day, people have the capacity to communicate with others through internet connections. With the advent and growing popularity of social networking websites such as Facebook.com and MySpace.com, people can rapidly share information about themselves with hundreds, if not thousands, of others. The prevalence of online communication has even seeped into modern vernacular, with people saying that they will “Facebook” their friends or that they will “blog” about their recent vacation. What is less clear, however, is how the words people use to describe themselves online offer a window into motivationally relevant ways personality expresses itself on the World Wide Web. The current research examined how narcissism, a personality trait marked by self-promotion, vanity, and grandiosity, relates to how people communicate information about themselves online. We expected that narcissists communicate in ways that draw attention to themselves. Specifically, we predicted that narcissistic people who used relatively few first-person singular pronouns would display more self-promoting and sexy images of themselves on their Facebook.com profiles (Study 1) and would use more profane and aggressive words in an online self-descriptive task (Study 2). We turn now to formulate our hypotheses.