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You’re so vain, you probably think this story’s about you, and if you’re someone who uses Instagram morning, noon and night then you’re right. It is.
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New research published in The Open Psychology Journal, suggests that excessive use of social media, and in particular visual-based social media like Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, is creating a population of narcissists.
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Narcissism is a clinical condition that describes people who have a hunger for appreciation, a sense of entitlement and generally lack empathy. People who are diagnosed as narcissists can also feel like they are better and more deserving than others, and highly narcissistic people often admit that they are more self-centred too.
The researchers from Swansea University and Milan University, studied how the personalities of 74 participants aged 18 to 34 changed over a four-month period.
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They found that the subjects who were excessively posting and sharing pictures on social media, displayed on average a 25 per cent increase in narcissistic traits over the four months of the study.
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That increase was enough to take many of these participants above the clinical cut-off for Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
“There have been suggestions of links between narcissism and the use of visual postings on social media, such as Facebook, but, until this study, it was not known if narcissists use this form of social media more, or whether using such platforms is associated with the subsequent growth in narcissism,” said Professor Phil Reed, from Swansea University’s Department of Psychology, who led the research.
“Taking our sample as representative of the population, which there is no reason to doubt, this means that about 20 per cent of people may be at risk of developing such narcissistic traits associated with their excessive visual social media use.”
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If you feel like using social media is making you more narcissistic than you’d like, the researchers found that people who primarily used social media for verbal postings, such as Twitter, didn’t show signs of narcissism.
So, there you have it, Twitter doesn’t create narcissists, just trolls, catfish and Presidents.
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