Research Reveals which Personality Traits Render You Most Susceptible to Social Media Addiction
The consequences of excessive social media use, in
particular the potential for addiction, have been the subject of heightened focus in recent years as
such technologies have taken an increasingly steadfast hold of many aspects of
our daily lives. Social media addiction has been linked with a plethora of
highly damaging issues ranging from isolation and depression to anxiety and in
some cases even suicidal thoughts, but what are the warning signs? And what is
it exactly that makes one person become addicted while others are able to
refrain?
This was exactly the subject of a new research project
conducted by a team from Binghamton University, State University of New York.
The team, led by assistant professor of information systems Isaac Vaghefi with
the help of Hamed Qahri-Saremi of DePaul University, collected and analysed
self-reported data from a pool of nearly 300 college-aged students in order to
explore how the interaction of personality traits can impact the
likelihood of developing an addiction to social networking.
“There has been plenty of research [conducted] on how the
interaction of certain personality traits affects addiction to things like
alcohol and drugs,” said Isaac Vaghefi. “We wanted to apply a similar framework
to social networking addiction.”
In their research the team were able to identify that that
three personality traits in particular – namely neuroticism, conscientiousness
and agreeableness - were related to social media addiction. Extraversion and
openness to experience, the two other personality traits said to make up the
well-established framework of the five-factor personality model, were found to
have little if any influence in the development of such addictions.
The interesting part lay in how exactly these traits
influence our susceptibility - for example on their own, the personality traits
of neuroticism and conscientiousness have direct negative and positive effects
on the likelihood of developing a social network addiction; when the two traits
are simultaneously present and thereby playing off each other however, neuroticism
seems to moderate the effect of conscientiousness as it relates to social
network addiction.
“It’s a complex and complicated topic. You can’t have a
simplistic approach,” said Vaghefi. “It’s more of a holistic approach to
discover what kinds of people are more likely to develop an addiction. Rather
than just focusing on one personality trait, this allows you to look at an all-inclusive
personality profile.”
Vaghefi’s full paper, titled ‘Personality Predictors of IT Addiction’, was presented at the 51st Hawaii International
Conference on Systems Science (Jan 2018).
Sam
is an aspiring novelist with a passion for fantasy and crime thrillers.
Currently working as Editor of Social Songbird, he hopes to one day drop that
'aspiring' prefix. Follow him @Songbird_Sam
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Research Reveals which Personality Traits Render You Most Susceptible to Social Media Addiction
Reviewed by Unknown
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Tuesday, March 13, 2018
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Reviewed by Unknown
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Tuesday, March 13, 2018
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