The Effect of Personality Traits on Social Media Behavior among Young Adults

Personality traits are stable characteristics that typically determine how an individual thinks, feels, and behaves. Narcissistic traits are linked with Narcissistic personality disorder more often and consist of characteristics such as need for admiration, sense of entitlement, lack of empathy, and exploiting others for personal good. Histrionic traits are also often associated with Histrionic personality disorder which consist of traits like the need for attention, dramatic expressions, and the constant need to seek reassurance. Social media behavior refers to the ways in which one carries oneself online which may include activities like liking posts, commenting, and posting own pictures. The underlying motives for these activities must be taken into account which is the matter of concern in the present study. For this research study, a total of 161 young adults from various universities and workplaces hailing from different cities in India aged between 18 and 25 were chosen as the sample from whom data was collected through Convenience Sampling method. Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI 13), Brief Histrionic Personality Scale (BHPS 11), and Social Media Usage Scale (SMUS 17) were utilized to examine the same. In the Data Analysis, descriptive statistics, Pearson’s r correlation was used to understand the relationship between the independent variables (Narcissistic and Histrionic traits) and the dependent variable (Social media behavior), and Multiple regression was used to compare the impact of Narcissistic and Histrionic traits on Social media behavior. The findings deduced that there exists a significant positive correlation between the variables, Narcissistic traits and Social media behavior and no negative correlation. There exists a significant positive correlation between the variables, Histrionic traits and Social media behavior and no negative correlation. Furthermore, Narcissistic traits do not have a stronger influence on Social media behavior, rather, Histrionic traits do.