Because narcissists use Facebook or Twitter as a tool for generating attention to themselves? Or because the social media format itself supports the culture of narcissism? According to research in recent years, the answer to both questions is yes.

Narcissism is a personality disorder and should be distinguished from healthy self-love.

Loving yourself is natural, while narcissists often lose the ability to empathize with other people, the desire to help, and finally, to love someone other than themselves. It should be understood that this affects not only the quality of life of the individual, but also the health of society as a whole.

Recently, both the media and the academic world have been talking about an epidemic of narcissistic behavior on social networks.

If people used to exhibit narcissistic behavior in a narrow circle of relatives and colleagues, today they have a much larger audience. Therefore, researchers were interested to know - what is the root cause? Do social networks make us narcissists, or do people who have previously shown signs of narcissism simply use them as a tool to generate attention to themselves?

A few years ago, the journal Personality and Social Psychology published a study by Laura Bufardi, who first asked users to take a psychological test that determined their level of narcissism, and then analyzed their profiles on social networks.

According to the results of the study, people who had the highest narcissism scores were the most active on social networks, published the largest number of their photos, which the author described as self-promoting (self-advertisement. - Ed.), and wrote characteristic texts. Then the author of the study asked ordinary users to evaluate the analyzed profiles and say which owners seemed narcissistic to them.

Most of the participants easily identified those users who had higher points on the narcissism scale according to the psychological test.

This study confirmed: after all, we don’t think that someone behaves too narcissistically online. This really characterizes the personality. And this can be determined without complex psychological tests, with the naked eye.