February 2010 Archives

Frequent YouJustGetMe collaborator Sam Gosling PhD. is in the papers again - this time, for a study that will sound very familiar to YJGM users.

This attention comes after the publication of a joint German-American study by researchers Mitja D. Back, Juliane M. Stopfer, Simine Vazire, Sam Gaddis, Stefan C. Schmukle, Boris Egloff and Samuel D. Gosling. The study set out to understand the same effect that YouJustGetMe looks at - where other people see you the way you see yourself. More specifically, though, the study looked at whether people were presenting an honest or idealized vision of themselves through their social media profiles.

It's an important question, because the commonly-held conceit amongst crotchety old people and jaded hipsters alike is that nobody is trustworthy. When it comes to the Internet, many think this is doubly true - that every Facebook profile is a exquisitely-crafted lie, that honesty disappeared right about the same time that ARPAnet appeared.

The study's findings directly contradicted this commonly-held belief. People were much more likely to display their real personality on the social networking sites rather than their idealised selves. This was uniform across the 5 qualities that YJGM tests, with dramatically higher accuracy for openness and extraversion and somewhat lower scores for neuroticism. Overall, though, people were remarkably honest in representing themselves and in discerning other people's personalities. In other words, people were honest!

"This study is another blow for that old stereotype that the web is some kind of scary hinterland, an untrustworthy place where anything goes and nothing is what it appears, peopled by adolescent boys pretending to be anything but adolescent boys," eloquently states PsyBlog. "Contrary to the received wisdom, as well as academic theorising that the internet encourages people to project an idealised self, this research suggests that people are remarkably honest in displaying their true personalities online.Whatever the cause, this fact may help to explain the phenomenal popularity of social networking sites: the truth draws people in."

Does being in a relationship make you a happier person? One social media giant now claims that their user data indicates a resounding "yes," and even more so if you're married - but not if it's an open relationship.

The Facebook data team extrapolated the happiness level of their users by considering how many positive and negative terms people used in their status updates - a methodology previously utilized to calculate the US Gross National Happiness Index. 

The team's findings may or may not surprise you, depending on your own relationship status - married people are the happiest! "People who are in a relationship seem less happy compared to married folks," explained study author Lisa Zhang. "[However,] there is less variation in both positivity and negativity amongst married people. Married people, however, tend to be older, and we know from other studies that people do become happier as they age."

The least happy people? It's not single people, nor widows - and not even those folks engaged in messy "it's complicated" scenarios! The unhappiest folks on Facebook are those in open relationships. However, this is in another regard a measure of expressiveness - perhaps those who are willing to disclose their being in an open relationship simply have personalities with higher levels of self-disclosure than others. This could also potentially illuminate why widowed people had the lowest levels of emotional expression in their status updates - a lower degree of self-disclosure.

Christopher Stedman of secular humanist blog Non-Prophet Status also remains nonplussed by efforts to quantify user happiness. "I'm wary of using Facebook as a reliable source for analyzing people's emotional-spiritual health," he opines. "That being said, I don't think that it is fair to argue that one's relationship status is an indicator of one's level of happiness. Correlation does not equate causation." Stedman raises an excellent point that underscores another trouble with studies of this sort: "if being in a relationship actually does make people happier - as some studies similarly say about religion - does it mean I should run out and date the first willing person I meet?"

Not computing quite yet? Here's an example: let's say that I, Nick, wanted to tweet my YJGM URL. Rather than having to put www.youjustgetme.com/nickmattos2, I can now put yjg.me/nickmattos2 - saving fourteen characters! It kind of makes you want to go guess my personality, doesn't it?

Narcissism can be defined as the personality trait of excessive egotism. When in a healthy proportion, narcissistic impulses function as a sort of emotional-immune system, safeguarding the familiarity and the well-being of the individual against invasion by outside influences. When it's out of proportion, though, one's personality starts to display self-involvement, arrogance, an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and a tendency towards exploitation. Paradoxically, though, narcissists are also fascinating to others. Why do we like them despite on some level recognizing their dysfunction? How did people let their personalities get to this unpleasant state?

A new study published by Mitja Back, Stefan Schmukle, and Boris Egloff in the January 2010 edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology illustrates both the way that narcissists ensnare others in a cycle of attraction and repulsion, and the way that narcissists are paradoxically self-absorbed and display little self-awareness of the traits that repel others.

 

Back et al. found that narcissism leads to popularity at first sight - test subjects registered that they liked self-identified narcissists at first sight (or what social scientists call "zero acquaintance"). Second, the aspect of narcissism that most turn people off in the long run - the exploitativeness and sense of entitlement - proved to be most attractive at zero acquaintance. Why was this? Part of the reason that narcissists were popular were due to external signifiers - they used more charming facial expressions, a more confident speaking tone, wore more fashionable clothes, had more trendy haircuts and were funnier. Put another way, narcissists seem cool, which lead the participants to believe - at first sight - that the narcissists are cool. This "exploitativeness equals coolness" equation can be seen in another effect of modern life - cultural appropriation, in which people adopt aesthetic elements of oppressed cultures, effectively displaying a sense of entitlement as a fashion statement. Some social theorists even purport that the concept of "cool pose" (or movement) is itself appropriated from African-American culture!

Returning to narcissism - as anyone who's had a truly narcissistic friend or partner can attest, the annoyance and frustration of having a self-absorbed, authoritarian, arrogant, exploitative friend quickly overshadows any sense of that friend's coolness. In short order, the narcissistic friend is abandoned - that is, abandoned to go off and dazzle someone else, starting the cycle again.