By Erica Zaiser An article on Science Daily discusses a recent
presentation given at the APA annual conference on the good and
bad effects of social networking. Now, I wasn’t at the
conference so I can’t comment as to the actual presentation or
the researchers giving it, but the article lays out a few of the
“arguments” for why social networking could be good and bad for
young people based on previous research on the topic. In it’s
bullet pointed list of “adverse effects” of social network use,
the first effect is in reference to a study on Facebook and
narcissistic tendencies. I actually wrote on this research when
it first came out in a previous SPE post. This research showed
that the more people checked their Facebook, the higher they
scored on measures of narcissism and that certain types of
content were also associated with this personality trait.
However, this was correlational research. In other words,
checking Facebook does not necessarily make young people become
more narcissistic. In fact it’s most