You learn a lot about people through Facebook...a lot! Sometimes I wonder if Facebook might be a good projective test for narcissism. What compels some people to post every detail of their lives assuming that all of their friends, family, remote acquaintances, and even strangers are interested?
Do we really need to know what you had for dinner, what you think of topics in the news or the American Idol candidates, your thoughts about your favorite sports teams or movie stars, exactly where you are right now, and so forth?
Perhaps like many middle aged adults, I came to Facebook reluctantly. My teenage son wanted to get on Facebook and my wife and I didn't want him on it unless we were also on Facebook too in order to monitor his online presence. The deal was that he could be on Facebook only if he "friended" us. This arrangement has worked out well but one of the unintended consequences is that a wide variety of people have emerged as Facebook friends: colleagues, old friends, neighbors, and so forth. I'm sure that many of you have similar stories.
Don't get me wrong, I generally like Facebook and think that it offers a variety of useful ways of learning about topics of interest and keeping up with colleagues and friends. But I have to wonder if the frequency and type of messages posted are a strong positive correlation with one's narcissism. An interesting study would be to give people several reliable and valid narcissism inventories and then correlate these scores with frequency and type (coded in some objective manner) of facebook postings. One would predict that they would be closely correlated.
I wonder if Facebook (and other social media offspring such as Twitter) might actually contribute to increases in and intensity of narcissism. Sounds like another possible study.
So, do you think that Facebook could be a projective test for narcissism? What say you?
