As social networking companies feel the heat to create a more socially responsible and positive experience for their millions of users, new research out of Binghamton University’s School of Management explores how the interaction of personality traits can impact the likelihood of developing an addiction to a social network.
“There has been plenty of research on how the interaction of certain personality traits affects addiction to things like alcohol and drugs,” says Isaac Vaghefi, assistant professor of management information systems. “We wanted to apply a similar framework to social networking addiction.”
Vaghefi, with the help of Hamed Qahri-Saremi of DePaul University, collected self-reported data from nearly 300 college-aged students and found that three personality traits in particular — neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness — were related to social network addiction.
These three personality traits are part of the five-factor personality model, a well-established framework used to theoretically understand human personality. Researchers found that the two other traits in the model — extraversion and openness to experience — did not play much of a role in the likelihood of developing a social network addiction.
Read more at Binghamton University
Photo credit: Jason Howie via Wikimedia Commons
