Narcissism and Social Media: The Role of Communal Narcissism

Kolbrun Harpa Kristinsdottir, Haukur Freyr Gylfason and Rannveig Sigurvinsdottir
Additional contact information
Kolbrun Harpa Kristinsdottir: Department of Psychology, Reykjavik University, 102 Reykjavik, Iceland
Haukur Freyr Gylfason: Department of Business, Reykjavik University, 102 Reykjavik, Iceland
Rannveig Sigurvinsdottir: Department of Psychology, Reykjavik University, 102 Reykjavik, Iceland

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 19, 1-14

Abstract: Agentic narcissism and vulnerable narcissism have been widely studied in relation to social media use. However, with research on communal narcissism in its early stages, the current study examines communal narcissism in relation to social media use. Specifically, the current study investigates whether communal narcissism is related to use and frequency of use of the popular social networking sites Instagram, Reddit and Twitter, and if communal narcissism relates to the importance of receiving feedback and to the quality-rating of self-presented content on those platforms. A total of 334 individuals were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, with two-thirds being male (66.7%). A regression analysis showed that communal narcissism was related to increased use of Instagram and Twitter but not Reddit. Sharing content, the importance of feedback and better than average ratings had positive associations with communal narcissism. The relationship between communal narcissism and sharing on social media was fully mediated by wanting validation on social media and higher ratings of self-presented content. Communal narcissism had a notably strong relationship with wanting validation on all platforms and our results suggest that communal narcissism might be especially relevant in the context of social media use.

Keywords: personality; communal narcissism; social networking sites; social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/19/10106/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/19/10106/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:19:p:10106-:d:643434

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().