Is There a Link between Narcissistic Personality Traits and Social Media Usage?

With the modernization of life and developments in the field of information technology, social media has become an integral part of individuals daily lives. Since social media covers the public sphere of individuals and is directly related to the individual, it is important to examine it in terms of different variables. At this point, personality traits such as narcissism are remarkable variables in terms of social media use. Social media offers important opportunities to individuals who desire to like themselves, stand out and make them more visible. Here is this study; It was designed to reveal the relationship between narcissistic personality traits and social media usage patterns. In this study where field research was used as a method, the data were collected from 400 university students with face-to-face survey technique. The results of the research show that the participants spend almost four hours a day on social media. The development of mobile technologies such as smart phones and starting to take more place in daily life; facilitated access to social media anytime and anywhere; these possibilities have resulted in people using social media for a longer period of time. Daily social media usage period of women and men is close to each other. While WhatsApp, Instagram, and YouTube are social media tools that university students use more frequently; Swarm, LinkedIn and Snapchat are less preferred. Students in the sample; they come across social media more often to have fun, spend time, messaging and get information about events/ people. University students include narcissism scale items; They gave higher scores to statements such as “I think I am a respected person in my environment, everyone tells me that I am always a good person and I always know what I am doing”. The level of narcissism of men is higher than that of women. In the study, a meaningful, weak positive relationship was found between the narcissism levels of university students and social media usage styles. As a result of the research; it was found that the narcissism level of the people in the sample positively predicted the daily social media usage time. As the level of narcissism of university student’s increases, daily social media usage time also increases. The increase in the level of narcissism of the participants is positively affected by the use of social media due to personal presentation. Again, there is a low level, positive significant relationship between the narcissism level of the sample and the frequency of using social media tools such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Swarm and Snapchat.