The rise of the internet and especially the emergence of social networking sites have changed our ways of communication and self-expression dramatically (Bazarova et al., 2013 and Weiser, 2001). With about 1.28 billion users of Facebook alone (Facebook Newsroom, 2014), it can be postulated that online self-presentation has become a “normal thing” to do (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008). While Facebook is by far the most popular social networking site world-wide (Mander, 2014), a broad range of these sites exist often tailored to a geographical region (e.g., Russia: VKontakte; China: Sina Weibo), created for a particular target group (e.g., mothers: CafeMom; researchers: ResearchGate), or focused on a specific life domain like business (e.g., Xing, LinkedIn), dating (e.g., PlentyofFish, Badoo), or traveling (e.g., CouchSurfing, WAYN).
Apart from inviting users to create and maintain a profile, many social networking sites also offer more dynamic tools for self-expression and communication (Winter et al., 2014). A very prominent example – implemented in most social networking sites – are so called status updates (Facebook’s term) or, more general, microblogs (Banerjee et al., 2009). In contrast to more traditional forms of communication like phone calls, e-mails, or text messages, these short one-to-many messages enable and encourage users to quickly share short updates about their daily lives with a large audience, like for example, all their friends on Facebook (Manago et al., 2012 and Ong et al., 2011). Users might then receive social feedback, that is, “likes” or comments. Around 400 million Facebook status updates created each day (Pring, 2012) clearly indicate that users enjoy the opportunity to keep their family, friends, and acquaintances posted about their thoughts, ideas, and feelings, as well as their current activity or state of mind (Banerjee et al., 2009).
Due to the popularity of status updates and the pervasiveness of social networking sites researchers started to wonder about the motivations for excessive online self-expression and raised the concern that frequent posting might be a sign of narcissism (e.g., Bergman et al., 2011, Carpenter, 2012 and Rosen et al., 2013). And while there are no systematic studies on the public opinion yet, countless press articles, blog posts, and comics (e.g., Jayson, 2009, O’Dell, 2010 and Rosen, 2007) provide at least anecdotal evidence that this concern is also shared by the general public (Buffardi and Campbell, 2008 and McKinney et al., 2012).
Narcissism, in its subclinical conceptualization as a personality trait, is characterized by a grandiose self-view, a pronounced self-focus, strong feelings of entitlement, a need for social admiration but a lack of concern for others and hence is related to many intra- and interpersonal problems (Back et al., 2010, Back et al., 2013, Campbell et al., 2002 and Morf and Rhodewalt, 2001). Even though subclinical narcissism is conceptualized and measured as a continuous trait (Campbell & Campbell, 2009), for the ease of exposition in the following we will use the term “narcissist” to describe people who score relatively high on measures of narcissism.
For many people, social networking sites have become an integral part of their daily life (Ivcevic & Ambady, 2013). Hence, it is crucial to test and understand the association between online behavior and personality (Hughes et al., 2012). The present studies contribute to the growing body of research on this topic and hopefully encourage other researchers to use non-self-report measures of online behaviors and to publish null results. Moreover, by empirically assessing the implicit theories of lay persons, the present research specifically aimed at also informing the general public. The results call for a more balanced debate suggesting that narcissists are far from flooding social networking sites with their status updates and should caution us against premature conclusions on the personality of our power posting friends on Facebook.
