Narcissism, Privacy and Communicating Online

Have you ever wondered why some people constantly post personal information on social media while others are very careful about the type of information they post? Being a naturally curious person, I was compelled to learn why some individuals are cautious while some are not even concerned about privacy on social networking sites.

To learn more about the topic, I teamed up with two professors from West Virginia University to conduct research that considered personality traits, including narcissism, self-esteem, computer anxiety and concern for information privacy to learn more about individuals behavioral intentions of social media.

Our study suggests that narcissism is an important psychological factor that predicts individuals’ behavioral intentions to control information privacy on social networking sites. Furthermore, the research we conducted turned out to be one of the first studies to apply a two-dimensional approach to narcissism in computer-mediated communication.

While there is so much more to learn about social networking site behavior, this research provides a starting point to help all communicators understand how and why people communicate differently through online social media.

To learn more, check out the full research article, recently published in Computers In Human Behavior.