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personality and individual differences 51 2011 57 62 contents lists available at sciencedirect personality and individual differences journal homepage www elsevier com locate paid narcissism and implicit attention seeking evidence ...

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                                                                     Personality and Individual Differences 51 (2011) 57–62
                                                                        Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
                                                       Personality and Individual Differences
                                                           journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid
              Narcissism and implicit attention seeking: Evidence from linguistic analyses
              of social networking and online presentation
                                          a,⇑                            b                   a                                c
              C. Nathan DeWall               , Laura E. Buffardi , Ian Bonser , W. Keith Campbell
              aDepartment of Psychology, University of Kentucky, 201 Kastle Hall, Lexington, KY 40506-0044, United States
              bUniversidad de Deusto, Avenida de las Universidades, 24, 48007 Bilbao, Spain
              cDepartment of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, United States
              article info                                       abstract
              Article history:                                   Twostudies examined hownarcissism, a personality trait marked by self-promotion, vanity, and grandi-
              Received 7 December 2010                           osity, related to how people communicate information about themselves online. We predicted that nar-
              Received in revised form 24 February 2011          cissists communicate in ways that draw attention to themselves. Speci“cally, we predicted that
              Accepted 7 March 2011                              narcissistic people who used relatively few “rst-person singular pronouns (e.g., I, and me) would dis-
              Available online 31 March 2011                     play more self-promoting and sexy images of themselves on their Facebook.com pro“le pages (Study 1)
              Keywords:                                          andwouldusemoreprofaneandaggressivewordsinanonlineself-descriptivetask(Study2).Bothstud-
              Narcissism                                         ies supported this hypothesis. Implications for narcissism and online communication research are
              Worduse                                            discussed.
              Linguistic inquiry word count                                                                                           2011Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
              Social networking
              Online communication
              Compensation
                 Eachday,peoplehavethecapacitytocommunicatewithothers                             1. Narcissism in virtual and non-virtual environments
              through internet connections. With the advent and growing popu-
              larity of social networking websites such as Facebook.com and                           Narcissismreferstoanin”atedandgrandioseself-concept.Nar-
              MySpace.com, people can rapidly share information about them-                       cissistic people have elevated levels of agentic traits such as intel-
              selves with hundreds, if not thousands, of others. The prevalence                   ligence, power, and dominance (e.g., Brown & Zeigler-Hill, 2004;
              of online communication has even seeped into modern vernacular,                     Campbell, Rudich, & Sedikides, 2002). In terms of the “ve-factor
              with people saying that they will Facebook their friends or that                model (FFM), narcissists score highly on extraversion and low on
              they will blog about their recent vacation. What is less clear,                 agreeableness (Miller & Campbell, 2008). Sub-clinical narcissists
              however, is how the words people use to describe themselves on-                     have good mental health, which is due in part to their high levels
              line offer a window into motivationally relevant ways personality                   of self-esteem (Sedikides, Rudich, Gregg, Kumashiro, & Rusbult,
              expresses itself on the World Wide Web. The current research                        2004). The link between narcissism and agentic feelings is deeply
              examined how narcissism, a personality trait marked by self-pro-                    ingrained. On both explicit and implicit measures, narcissists en-
              motion, vanity, and grandiosity, relates to how people communi-                     dorse elevated levels of agency (Campbell, Bosson, Goheen, Lakey,
              cate information about themselves online.                                           &Kernis, 2007; Campbell, Rudich, & Sedikides, 2002).
                 Weexpected that narcissists communicate in ways that draw                            Within the context of interpersonal relationships, narcissists
              attention to themselves. Speci“cally, we predicted that narcissistic                use their relationship partners as a means of regulating their posi-
              people who used relatively few “rst-person singular pronouns                        tive self-views. This can take the form of selecting attractive
              woulddisplaymoreself-promotingandsexyimagesofthemselves                             romanticpartnerswhocanincreasepositiveperceptionsoftheself
              ontheir Facebook.com pro“les (Study 1) and would use more pro-                      (Campbell, 1999), or performing well on dif“cult tasks when doing
              fane and aggressive words in an online self-descriptive task (Study                 so is linked to gaining public admiration (Wallace & Baumeister,
              2). We turn now to formulate our hypotheses.                                        2002). Narcissists are also especially adept at attracting relation-
                                                                                                  ship partners. At early stages of relationship formation, they are
                                                                                                  interesting, exciting, con“dent, and entertaining (Foster, Shrira, &
               ⇑ Corresponding author.                                                            Campbell, 2006; Oltmanns, Friedman, Fiedler, & Turkheimer,
                  E-mail  addresses: nathan.dewall@uky.edu,   cnathandewall@gmail.com     (C.     2004). As their relationships progress, however, narcissists show
              Nathan DeWall).                                                                     less warmth and care for relationship partners, engage in game
              0191-8869/$ - see front matter  2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
              doi:10.1016/j.paid.2011.03.011
          58                                        C. Nathan DeWall et al./Personality and Individual Differences 51 (2011) 57–62
          playing and in“delity, and are liked less by their partners com-               responses depend on the combination of narcissism and the num-
          pared to people low in narcissism (e.g., Campbell, Foster, & Finkel,           ber of “rst-person singular pronouns used, we did not expect to
          2002; Schmitt & Buss, 2001).                                                   observereliable main effects for narcissism or “rst-person singular
             Arecent study of narcissism in social networking pro“le pages               pronoun usage.
          dovetailed nicely with previous “ndings investigating narcissism
          in non-virtual environments (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008). On Face-              4. Present research
          book.com pro“le web pages, narcissism related to higher levels of
          social activity and greater self-promoting themes in posted con-                  In the present studies, we predicted that narcissists would dis-
          tent. There was agreement between independent observers rat-                  play a compensatory pattern through other routes. Speci“cally,
          ings of how narcissistic web page owners were and how                          whentheydidnotdrawattentiontothemselvesbyusing“rst-per-
          narcissistic web page owners rated themselves. Thus, narcissism                son singular pronouns, we hypothesized that they would compen-
          manifests itself similarly in virtual and non-virtual environments.            sate by posting photographs and using language that would draw
                                                                                         attention to themselves. The current research tested this hypothe-
          2. Narcissists word use and esteem regulation                                 sis in two studies. In Study 1, we harvested information from
                                                                                         undergraduate Facebook.com pro“le pages and examined whether
             Narcissists use a number of different routes to boost their self-           narcissistic pro“le owners displayed a self-promoting and sexy
          esteemand,thereby,maintainanoverlypositiveandin”atedsense                      photoofthemselveswhentheyhadusedlowlevelsof“rst-person
          of self. Important to the present research, one method by which                singular pronounstodescribethemselvesonline.Study2extended
          narcissists regulate their esteem is through communication pat-                this research to a large sample of adults who completed a measure
          terns. Narcissists brag about their accomplishments in conversa-               of narcissism and a self-description task on the internet.
          tion (Buss & Chiodo, 1991) and use more “rst-person singular
          pronouns during impromptu monologues (Raskin & Shaw, 1988).                    4.1. Study 1: Implicit compensation in Facebook pro“les
          First-person pronoun use is one particularly useful variable to
          examine with respect to narcissism because pronouns offer rich                    Study 1 provided an initial test of the hypothesis that narcissis-
          information regarding how people relate to others, especially                  tic people compensate for using relatively few words related to
          howpeople distinguish themselves from others. Thus, using “rst-                themselves by engaging in actions that may draw attention to
          person singular pronouns is one means by which narcissists draw                themselves. Participants were owners of Facebook.com pro“le
          attention to themselves.                                                       pages, which contained a section in which participants described
             Narcissists word use on the internet is one focus of this re-              themselves and uploaded a picture of themselves to be displayed
          search. A growing body of research has shown that word use can                 to members of their social network. We expected narcissistic par-
          provide an invaluable means of assessing cognitive, emotional,                 ticipants to display a self-promoting and sexy picture of them-
          and behavioral processes (Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer,                    selves, but only when they had not used many “rst-person
          2003). Like Raskin and Shaw (1988), we use the quantity of “rst-               singular pronouns when describing themselves to others.
          person singular pronouns used as a proxy for psychological self-
          importance to examine how narcissists who have used relatively                 5. Method
          few words that relate to themselves communicate in virtual
          environments.                                                                  5.1. Participants
                                                                                                   1
          3. Narcissism and implicit compensation                                           Eighty undergraduateFacebook.comowners(55women,25men;
                                                                                         age:M=18.89(SD=1.03))participatedinexchangeforpartialcourse
             Acrucial component of narcissism is the need to be the center               credit.AllparticipantsgaveconsenttohavetheirFacebook.compages
          of attention because doing so ful“lls narcissists goal of being agen-         to be used in the present research.
          tic. When attention to the self is not forthcoming, narcissists may
          engage in compensatory actions to direct attention toward the self             5.2. Materials and procedure
          (Buss & Chiodo, 1991). The current research seeks to show that
          narcissists engage in behaviors online to draw attention to them-                 Owner participants arrived at the laboratory individually and
          selves when they have used relatively few words about them-                    then completed the narcissistic personality inventory (NPI; Raskin
          selves. Although narcissists use language to direct attention to               & Terry, 1988). The NPI had high internal reliability (a=.78;
          the self more than non-narcissists (Raskin & Shaw, 1988), they                 M=17.76, SD=6.02, range: 5–30) and responses were summed
          mayoccasionally use relatively few “rst-person pronouns if doing               to form a composite measure of narcissistic personality.
          so can gain them liking, status, and admiration from others. This                 Next, participants logged onto Facebook.com on a lab computer
          would enable narcissists to ful“ll their goal of appearing agentic             and displayed their main pro“le page on the computer screen,
          (Brown & Zeigler-Hill, 2004; Campbell, Rudich, and Sedikides,                  whichisdisplayedtomembersoftheownerssocialnetwork.Once
          2002). Yet, because the need for narcissists to draw attention to              the pro“le page was displayed, the research assistant saved it and
          the self is deeply ingrained in their psyche, narcissists may not              debriefed the participant.
          be consciously aware of this implicit compensation process that                   Linguistic content was taken from the About Me section of the
          occurs when they use relatively few words about themselves.                    Facebook.compro“lepage.Inthissection,ownersofFacebook.com
             Thus, we predicted an interaction between narcissism and the                pages describe themselves in any way that they desire to their so-
          numberof“rst-personsingularpronounsparticipants used in pre-                   cial network. To analyzethelinguisticcontentoftheAboutMesec-
          dictingresponsesthatmaydrawattentiontotheself.Whennarcis-                      tion, we used the linguistic inquiry word count program (LIWC;
          sists use relatively few “rst-person singular pronouns, they may               Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007). The LIWC is a widely used
          seek to draw attention to themselves. In contrast, when narcissists
          use a larger number of “rst-person singular pronouns, they should               1 Eighty of Buffardi and Campbells (2008) 129 participants were included in this
          not engage in responses that may result in them receiving addi-                study because these participants included About Me sections in their Facebook.com
          tional attention. Because our conceptual framework suggests that               pro“les.
                                                               C. Nathan DeWall et al./Personality and Individual Differences 51 (2011) 57–62                                             59
               andwell-validatedprogramthatcountsthepercentageofwordsin                                  displaying a main photo that was less self-promoting and sexy.
               a body of text that correspond to various categories (Mehl, 2006).                        The narcissism main effect was not signi“cant, b=0.04, t=0.38,
               The program uses an internal default dictionary comprised of sev-                         p=.71.
               eral word categories according to how much a group of words re-                               Toclarifythenatureofthisinteraction,weexaminedthesimple
               late to a particular topic. The LIWC word categories have adequate                        effect of narcissism on main photo ratings among those who used
               psychometricproperties(Pennebakeretal.,2007).Wewerespecif-                                relatively high (i.e.,+1 SD) and low (i.e., 1 SD) amounts of “rst-
               ically interested in how often participants used “rst-person singu-                       person singular pronouns. Among participants who used relatively
               lar pronouns, as frequent use of these pronouns is associated with                        low amounts of “rst-person singular pronouns, narcissism related
               narcissistic personality (Raskin & Shaw, 1988). All About Me sec-                         to higher ratings of drawing attention to self in their main photo,
               tions were spell-checked prior to analysis. The narratives con-                           b=0.33, t=2.08, p=.04. In contrast, among participants who used
               tained 4854 total words.                                                                  relatively high amounts of “rst-person singular pronouns, narcis-
                   EachFacebook.compro“lepagecontainsamainphoto,whichis                                  sism was unrelated to how much attention they drew to them-
               viewed by all members of the owners social network. We had “ve                           selves in their main photo, b = 0.25, t = 1.60, p = .11.
               coders, all blind to owners NPI scores, rate each owners main                               Additional analyses examined the simple effect of “rst-person
               photo on characteristics that would draw attention to the owners                         singular pronoun use on drawing attention to oneself in the main
               page. First, the main photo was rated according to how much the                           photo among participants who were relatively high (i.e.,+1SD) and
               owner was self-promoting in the photo by averaging coders rat-                           low(i.e., 1SD) on narcissism. As expected, among narcissistic par-
               ings of how self-promoting and vain the photo was. Second, the                            ticipants, use of “rst-person singular pronouns correlated nega-
               mainphotowasratedonhowsexytheownerappearedbyaverag-                                       tively with drawing attention to oneself by displaying a self-
               ing coders judgments of how sexy, modest (reversed), and clothed                         promoting and sexy main photo, b=0.50, t=3.11, p=.003. In
               (reversed) the main photo was. All ratings were made on a 7-point                         contrast, non-narcissistic participants showed no correlation with
               scalerangingfrom1(notatall)to7(verymuch).Becauseconsensus                                 “rst-person singular pronoun use and displaying a self-promoting
               among the “ve coders on the self-promoting and sexy adjectives                            andsexymainphoto,b=0.09,t=0.55,p=.58.
               (self-promoting,vain,sexy,modest,andclothed)wassuf“cient(al-
               phas .71–.90 for the “ve items), responses to the two self-promo-                         7. Discussion
               tion items and the three sexy items were collapsed across the
               “ve coders. Ratings of self-promotion and sexiness were highly                                Study 1 offered initial evidence that narcissistic people drew
               correlated (r = .88, p < .001) and were averaged to form a compos-                        attention to themselves by displaying a self-promoting and sexy
               ite measure of drawing attention to self.                                                 main photo on their Facebook.com pro“le page, but this behavior
                                                                                                         was contingent on how many words they had used about them-
               6. Results                                                                                selves in an online self-description. When narcissistic participants
                                                                                                         usedlowlevelsof“rst-personsingularpronounstodescribethem-
                   We predicted that narcissistic participants would call more                           selves, they displayed a photo that was highly self-promoting and
               attention to themselves by displaying a self-promoting and sexy                           sexy. In contrast, narcissism did not relate to ratings of their main
               mainphotowhentheyhadusedalownumberof“rst-personsin-                                       photo when participants had used a large number of “rst-person
               gular pronouns in their About Me sections. Men tend to have high-                         singular pronouns to describe themselves.
               er narcissism scores than women do (Ames, Rose, & Anderson,
               2006). Because our results were not moderated by participant gen-                         7.1. Study 2
               der, we included participant gender as a covariate in all analyses.
               All predictors were centered prior to analysis.                                               Study2soughttoreplicateandextendthe“ndingsofStudy1in
                   As expected, a signi“cant narcissism“rst-person singular                             twoways.First, we used a large sample of adults instead of an en-
               pronoun use interaction emerged, b=0.27, t=2.52, p=.01                                  tirely undergraduate sample. Because narcissism correlates nega-
               (Fig. 1). The main effect for “rst-person singular pronoun use fell                       tively with age (Foster, Campbell, & Twenge, 2003), it was
               just short of signi“cance, b = 0.21, t = 1.93, p < .06, such that                       desirable to replicate our effects in a sample characterized by low-
               greater use of “rst-person singular pronouns was associated with                          erlevelsofnarcissism.Second,weusedawrittenmeasureofdraw-
                                                                                                         ingattentiontotheselfinsteadofavisualmeasure,namelytheuse
                                                                                                         of profanity and aggressive words participants used when describ-
                                                                                                         ing themselves. This type of word use quali“es as a behavior that
                                                                                                         could be used to draw attention to the self because of the low
                                                                                                         base-rate of using profane and aggressive (e.g., kill and fuck) words
                                                                                                         to describe oneself. We expected that narcissistic participants
                                                                                                         would use more swear words in their self-descriptions when they
                                                                                                         had used low levels of “rst-person singular pronouns, but not
                                                                                                         when they had already drawn attention to themselves by using
                                                                                                         high levels of “rst-person singular pronouns.
                                                                                                         8. Method
                                                                                                         8.1. Participants
                                                                                                             One thousand seventy-two adult volunteers (859 women, 200
                                                                                                         men, 13 did not specify gender) were recruited via online adver-
                                                                                                         tisements      placed     in    different    US cities       (age:     M=32.72,
               Fig. 1. Narcissism  use of “rst-person singular pronoun interaction on ratings of        SD=11.71). Participants were free to complete this study from
               self-promoting and sexiness Facebook.com pro“le main photo. Study 1.                      wherever they were able to access the internet. The postings on
          60                                     C. Nathan DeWall et al./Personality and Individual Differences 51 (2011) 57–62
          www.craigslist.org directed participants to the website www.sur-
          veymonkey.com, which was used to design and host the survey.
          Participants did not receive any compensation for participation.
          Of these participants, 234 provided incomplete NPI and/or self-
          description data, leaving 838 participants (689 women, 145 men,
          4 did not specify gender; age: M=33.32, SD=11.72) for “nal
          analysis.
          8.2. Materials and procedure
             Participants were told the study involved completing a person-
          ality test and then writing an essay about themselves. After giving
          their consent, participants completed the narcissistic personality
          inventory (
                     a=.83;M=14.62,SD=6.83,range:0–38).Next,partic-
          ipants were asked to write three essays about themselves. The
          instructions emphasized that participants would be communicat-
          ing about traits that were relevant to themselves, to be as speci“c
          as possible, and that their results would be analyzed carefully by
          the researchers. Participants were also informed that their results
          would not be shared with people other than the researchers in             Fig. 2. Narcissism  use of “rst-person singular pronoun interaction on use of
          charge of the study. Hence, the instructions alerted participants         profane and aggressive words when making a self-description. Study 2.
          that their online self-descriptions would be considered carefully         Amongparticipants whousedarelativelylow amountof “rst-per-
          by the researchers in charge of the study. By random assignment,          son singular pronouns, narcissism was associated with greater use
          participants were assigned to write their three essays about why          of swear words, b=0.20, t=4.19, p<.001. In contrast, among par-
          they did or did not have certain personality traits. Participants         ticipants who used a relatively high percentage of “rst-person sin-
          were also randomly assigned to write about personality traits that        gular pronouns, narcissism did not relate to more frequent use of
          were pre-rated as highly negative (i.e., dishonest, untrustworthy,        antisocial words, b = 0.05, t = 0.97, p = .34.
          andunkind)orhighlypositive (i.e., honest, trustworthy, and kind).            Additional analyses examined the simple effect of word use
          For example, a participant assigned to write about why he or she          amongparticipantshigh(i.e.,+1SD)andlow(i.e.,1SD)innarcis-
          had positive personality traits was instructed to write three brief     sism. As expected, among narcissistic participants, use of “rst-per-
          essays regarding why you have each of the following personality           son singular pronouns correlated negatively with antisocial word
          traits: honest, trustworthy, kind. After participants completed         use, b = 0.13, t = 2.67, p = .008. In contrast, non-narcissistic par-
          their essays, they received a debrie“ng.                                  ticipants showedanunexpectedpositivecorrelationwith“rst-per-
             Weperformed linguistic analyses using the LIWC (Pennebaker             sonsingularpronounuseandantisocialworduse,b=0.12,t=2.41,
          et al., 2007). All narratives were spell-checked prior to submission      p<.02.
          to the LIWC. The narratives contained 72,229 total words. We cre-
          ated an antisocial word use index by combining the percentage of          10. Discussion
          words related to anger and aggression (e.g., hate and kill) with
          swear words (e.g., fuck and damn). The use of swear words corre-             These“ndingsextendtheStudy1“ndingsbyshowingthatnar-
          sponds to accepted de“nitions of antisocial behavior in that their        cissists shift their linguistic style according to the amount of “rst-
          use is not in agreement with standards for appropriate behavior           person singular pronouns they use in an online self-description
          (Anderson & Bushman, 2002). Our effects were not moderated by             activity. When narcissists used a low number of “rst-person singu-
          whether participants wrote about why they did or did not have             lar pronouns, they drew attention to themselves by using higher
          the particular trait or the valence of the traits. Hence we collapsed     numbers of profane and aggressive words in narratives about
          ourresultsacrossallconditions.Becauseourresultswerenotmod-                themselves. When narcissists had already drawn attention to
          erated by participant gender, we also included participant gender         themselves by using a high number of “rst-person singular pro-
          as a covariate in all analyses.                                           nouns, however, they did not use higher numbers of profane and
                                                                                    aggressive words in their narratives. Thus, narcissistic participants
          9. Results                                                                displayed signs of implicit compensation as a means of drawing
                                                                                    possible attention to the self when attention was not forthcoming.
             We predicted that narcissistic participants would call more
          attention to themselves by using antisocial words when they had           10.1. General discussion
          used a low number of “rst-person singular pronouns in their es-
          says. As expected, a signi“cant narcissism x “rst-person singular            Digital communication has become a way of life. People email
          pronoun use emerged, b=0.13, t=3.55, p<.001 (see Fig. 2).               instead of writing letters, text instead of call, and plan events with
          We also found a main effect for narcissism, b=0.08, t=2.21,               friends and family through social networking sites instead of send-
          p<.03, such that higher scores related to greater use of antisocial       ing invitations through the mail. Because digital communication is
          words. This main effect replicates prior work showing a relation-         so widespread, the current investigation did not seek to add to
          ship between narcissism and aggression (Bushman & Baumeister,             prior research comparing personality traits between people who
          1998). The main effect for “rst-person singular pronoun use was           do versus do not use digital communication methods (Marcus,
          not signi“cant, b = 0.004, t = 0.13, p = .90.                           Machilek, & Schütz, 2006). Instead, the current work investigated
             To clarify the nature of this interaction, we examined the effect      whether narcissistic people use strategies in how they communi-
          of narcissism on antisocial word usage among participants who             cate with others online so that they are not deprived of attention
          used relatively high (i.e., +1 SD) and low (i.e., 1 SD) amounts of       being directed toward the self. If narcissistic people do not use
          “rst-person singular pronouns in their self-descriptive essays.           wordsthatdrawattentiontotheself,weexpectedthattheywould
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...Personality and individual differences contents lists available at sciencedirect journal homepage www elsevier com locate paid narcissism implicit attention seeking evidence from linguistic analyses of social networking online presentation a b c nathan dewall laura e buffardi ian bonser w keith campbell adepartment psychology university kentucky kastle hall lexington ky united states buniversidad de deusto avenida las universidades bilbao spain cdepartment georgia athens ga article info abstract history twostudies examined hownarcissism trait marked by self promotion vanity grandi received december osity related to how people communicate information about themselves we predicted that nar in revised form february cissists ways draw specically accepted march narcissistic who used relatively few rst person singular pronouns g i me would dis play more promoting sexy images on their facebook prole pages study keywords andwouldusemoreprofaneandaggressivewordsinanonlineself descriptivetask bo...

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