The amount of research on social networking sites (SNS) and narcissism is accumulating quickly requiring greater levels of variable specification and more fine-tuned hypothesis testing to clearly determine the relationships among key variables. The current investigation examines two of the most popular SNS, Facebook and Twitter, formulating hypotheses around the specific features of each site within college and adult samples. Unlike previous research that has focused almost exclusively on SNS usage, we focused on active usage (i.e., SNS content generation) as opposed to passive usage (i.e., SNS consumption) and included reasons for usage as a potential black box in the narcissism to SNS usage relationship. Results suggest that the features of Twitter make tweeting the preferred means of active usage among narcissists in the college sample, but not the adult sample, who prefer Facebook. In fact, we found no significant direct or indirect relationship with active usage on Facebook for the college sample, calling into question popular press articles linking Millennial narcissism with Facebook use. Additionally platform differences (i.e., microblogging versus profile-based) may explain the importance of active usage on Twitter relative to Facebook. That is, with Twitter, narcissistic motives for usage all manifest through tweeting while Facebook provides other mechanisms to achieve narcissistic motives.
In recent years, the popular press has advanced the notion that social networking sites (SNS) and narcissism are tightly linked (Jayson, 2009 and O’Dell, 2010). However, the research examining the relationship between narcissism and social networking has yielded modest and somewhat inconsistent findings (e.g., Bergman et al., 2011, Carpenter, 2012 and Nadkarni and Hofmann, 2012). This line of research has looked at a number of different SNS with a variety of different populations (teenagers, college students, young adults, etc.), and these differences may account for some of the variance in the findings. Thus, recent research has taken a more definitive approach to investigating social networking behavior by making hypotheses specific to different social media platforms (Chen, 2011 and Panek et al., 2013). Consistent with this approach, the current study sought to examine the potential differential relationships between narcissism and two highly popular, but different, SNS, Facebook and Twitter, within the context of two large and diverse samples. Further, unlike previous research that has focused almost exclusively on SNS usage, we examined reasons for usage as a potential black box in the narcissism to SNS usage relationship.
Currently, the two most popular SNS in the United States are Facebook and Twitter (eBizMBA, 2013). It is estimated that Facebook has 750 million visitors per month, while Twitter has 250 million visitors per month (eBizMBA, 2013). The usage statistics indicate growing popularity for both Twitter and Facebook, with Twitter growing significantly faster than Facebook (BCS, 2013). Twitter’s recent surge makes it increasingly relevant in the discussion of narcissism. Additionally, Twitter has certain inherent characteristics that might make it more conducive to narcissistic motives and behaviors than other popular SNS, such as Facebook
