Is Social Media making us all more narcissistic?

A similar question was posed in this weeks Symposium, some on the panel of tutes were instantly dismissive equating narcissism with a lack of empathy, this however is only one of many traits that may be attributed to Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

An estimated 6.2% of the US population suffers from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), meaning they meet five or more of the following criteria according to the DSM-V:

-Has a grandiose sense of self-importance, exaggerating their abilities and achievements
-Has persistent fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
-Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and should only associate with people of the same status
-Has a constant need for attention, affirmation and praise
-Has a strong sense of entitlement and an expectation of special treatment
-Is exploitative of others, taking advantage of them for personal gain
-Lacks empathy for others
-Is often envious of others or believes others are envious of them
-Regularly shows arrogant or haughty behaviors and attitudes

Many more people do not meet all of the criteria for NPD, but may still exhibit narcissistic personality traits from time to time. For this reason it is difficult to know for sure how many narcissists might be out there!

The question of whether social media is driving narcissism attributes a rise in the prevalence or visibility of NPD or simply of NPD traits to social media use, it’s a sort of technological determinist moral panic, while attending FODI (festival of dangerous ideas) I sat in a presentation, by author of the book, “The Life of I”, Anne Manne, called “The Narcissism Epidemic“, in her talk Manne addressed this question stating her research indicated Social Media didn’t cause narcissism but merely created a megaphone for it and a platform that supports it’s expression.

Recent research in psychology shows that narcissism has been on the rise during the last 30 years, especially among young people. One study even showed that 9.4% of 20- to 29-year-olds exhibit extreme narcissism, compared with only 3.2% of those older than 65. Perhaps this is not a surprise in light of how our culture has shifted to emphasize social media and a digital representation of our collated selves presented to the world as central to our identities, sense of self and self-esteem. Indeed, there is a direct positive correlation  between social media usage and narcissism, meaning that the more narcissistic you are, the heavier your social media usage, this doesn’t suggest the more you use social media the more narcissistic you become rather that the more narcissitc you are the more appealing social media is. Even the word ‘selfie’ and what it stands for has a rather narcissistic implication, don’t you think? Sadly, as narcissism’s visibility has risen with the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, so too, according to this research, has there been a steep decline in altruism and empathy.

We shouldn’t write off social media though, the same papers that note these changes also note that millenials (those born approximately between 1982 and 2000 and heaviest users of social media) are the most civic minded generation since the great depression, those in between the 1930s and 1980s were raised to be more individualistic. Campaigns like PIPA/SOPA and events like the Arab Springs, show that these platforms can be used in a number of more collective ways, collaborative wiki projects and OpenSource software development show that networks can have a collective power through contributions of many individuals to a single outcome.

Social Media and the Narcissist, is just the latest development in a long cultural shift toward the individual as the center of their own existence, an idea that has been tied to emergence of a dominant free-market capitalist and consumerism ideology, and that has been used to tie this economic ideology to the idea of democracy and freedom through individual personal rights and freedoms.

Adam Curtis explores this in more depth n his 3 part documentary “The Century of Self”, the visibility of narcissism and any increase in it’s prevalence is not a direct result of social media but a continuation of almost 100 years of cultural shift.

I’ve written about this cultural shift manifesting itself in contemporary Australian politics in past blogs, here and here.