What lies behind a narcissist’s selfie? The Implications of Grandiose and Vulnerable Narcissist’s Instagram Usage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Individuals are spending more time on social media sites (i.e., Instagram), which has contributed to decreased in-person contact and increased narcissism. This study examined how vulnerable narcissists (i.e., those characterized by low self-esteem, introversion) and grandiose narcissists (i.e., those characterized by high self-esteem, extraversion) engage on Instagram and how their online behaviour is perceived by others. Given that vulnerable narcissists are more likely to seek others’ approval compared to grandiose narcissists, vulnerable narcissists may be more concerned with their social media behaviour (e.g., spend more time editing their selfies). In turn, these behaviours may be visible to other social media users. In Study 1, we explored whether vulnerable narcissists would spend more time taking selfies and editing them compared to grandiose narcissists. Target participants (N = 152) took selfies in the lab and completed questionnaires assessing their social media engagement. We confirmed that vulnerable narcissists spend more time taking and editing selfies compared to grandiose narcissists. In Study 2, we showed the target selfies to a new sample of perceivers (N = 256) who rated each target’s narcissism, self-esteem, and social media usage. Perceivers were able to detect how long individuals spend on Instagram, how many selfies individuals take, and how long they spend taking selfies. Vulnerable narcissists, but not grandiose narcissists, were perceived as using social media more, as having lower self-esteem, and higher narcissism. Thus, vulnerable narcissists report engaging more in social media behaviours, which viewers can easily detect. Department: Psychology Faculty Mentor: Dr. Miranda Giacomin
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".