Dr. Shawn Bergman on “Twitter versus Facebook: Exploring the role of narcissism in the motives and usage of different social media platforms”

Psychological Research Stories

One of my favorite aspects of creating this podcast is the opportunity to attempt to improve as I try to produce creative and interesting content for those who are interested. One of the tools that I have relied on is the advice from other podcasters, mostly from podcasts about podcasting. The world of podcasts about podcasting is surprisingly large, and there are many individuals who have created very successful careers of doing podcast consulting. A while back, one of these individuals named Cliff Ravenscraft created a podcast episode titled “Are Podcasters Narcissists? & New Interview Request Procedure.” In it, he discusses the fact that in one of his comments an individual called him a narcissist. He then talked about whether he thought this was true for him, as well as if it may be true for most podcasters. If you want to hear his thoughts on this, check out the episode, but for me I think the question of whether certain platforms may be driving individuals of a certain characteristic towards it.

The same question relates to Facebook and Twitter, as it is interesting to ponder whether there is something about these platforms that would be particularly attractive to individuals with higher levels of Narcissism. In today’s episode, we have the opportunity to hear from Dr. Shawn Bergman about one of his articles that relate to this topic. We discuss his article “Twitter versus Facebook: Exploring the role of narcissism in the motives and usage of different social media platforms.” The abstract for the episode is listed below. If you have any comments or questions about the episode or podcast, in general, feel free to share either a comment in the section below or you can send a message by going to methodologyforpsychology.org/contact. Thank you so much for listening.

Abstract

“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.”

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