Narcissism and implicit attention seeking: Evidence from linguistic analyses of social networking and online presentation

Abstract

Two studies examined how narcissism, a personality trait marked by self-promotion, vanity, and grandiosity, related to how people communicate information about themselves online. We predicted that narcissists communicate in ways that draw attention to themselves. Specifically, we predicted that narcissistic people who used relatively few first-person singular pronouns (e.g., “I,” and “me”) would display more self-promoting and sexy images of themselves on their Facebook.com profile pages (Study 1) and would use more profane and aggressive words in an online self-descriptive task (Study 2). Both studies supported this hypothesis. Implications for narcissism and online communication research are discussed.