Abstract
Social media like Twitter or Instagram play the role of fertile platforms for self-exhibition and allow their users to earn a good repute. People higher in grandiosity share their contents in a charismatic way and as a result, they are successful in gaining attention from others, which may also influence their responses and behaviors. Such attention and repute enable them to be a trendsetter or a socially recognized maven. In this paper, we present a complex adaptive mental network model of a narcissist to see how popularity can adaptively influence his/her behavior. To analyze and to support behavior showed by our model, we used some key performance indicators from the literature to study the popularity and narcissism of 30 Instagram profiles. The results of the—both computational and empirical—study indicate that our presented computational adaptive network model in general shows the behavior found from the empirical data.
Highlights
Narcissism reflects a personality trait which relates to a certain cluster of human behaviors, which display self-superiority and self-exhibition
In a preliminary version of our work, we presented a complex second-order adaptive network model that explains the reactions of a narcissist in case of positive and negative feedback (Jabeen et al 2019)
Each section will discuss the key performance indicators (KPIs) of popularity with reference to narcissism (Table 3), i.e.: (a) number of followers per month, (b) the average number of likes obtained per month, and (c) hashtag usage
Summary
Narcissism reflects a personality trait which relates to a certain cluster of human behaviors, which display self-superiority and self-exhibition. These behaviors mostly relate to entitlement seeking and having a messiah complex. Narcissists need admiration and dwell for their own appearance and achievement, which often leads to lack of empathy for others (Bushman and Baumeister 1998; Fan et al 2011). Social media platforms can help narcissists to achieve popularity and have a feeling of worth for themselves, but this can increase their vulnerability due to the pervasive nature of social media (Bushman and Baumeister 1998). There are very limited computational studies addressing these behaviors. How popularity can influence such behavior was not studied yet in more depth. Extending the preliminary (Jabeen et al 2019), the current paper addresses this
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