Personality and Individual Differences
Personality and Individual Differences
4 years ago

A picture tells a thousand words: What Facebook and Twitter images convey about our personality

Researchers have questioned whether there is a relationship between personality and patterns of online self-presentation. This paper examined, more specifically, whether personality predicts profile choices as well as image choice behaviour on two different SNSs: Twitter and Facebook. We found that personality does, to some extent, predict choices regarding profile images; however, not always in the direction we predicted and results differed across sites. We found that participants who scored higher on conscientiousness and lower on extraversion were more likely to change their Facebook profile image. Participants who scored lower on extraversion were more likely to choose a Twitter profile image that included a photograph of themselves compared to participants who scored higher on extraversion. For participants whose Facebook profile image was a photograph of themselves, a greater proportion of participants selected a recent photograph from the past six months. However, this was not the case for Twitter. We conclude that personality can predict some image choices and behaviours that might be useful for future work on authentication and identification, although other predictor variables are potentially also important when considering the types of individual characteristics which might predict online behaviour on SNSs.

Publisher URL: www.sciencedirect.com/science

DOI: S0191886916312478

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.