Social networking sites in these days have taken over our lives. Interestingly enough everyone uses social media and gets effected by social media in different ways and with the help of science we can see the reason of the changes. A study by Haferkamp (2011) focuses on the effects of online profiles on their recipients. In this study two experiments were executed.
The first experiment is about how a profile picture effects your own body image and how you feel about yourself whereas the second one is about the effects when you see different levels of careers. In the first experiment people were confronted with both attractive and unattractive profiles. After that people’s emotional state and satisfaction with their own body image was measured. The results show that people were in a negative emotional state when they looked at the attractive profiles rather than the unattractive ones.
In the second experiment people were confronted with both successful and rather unsuccessful careers and again emotional states have been measured only to find out that people have not felt a negative emotional state however the function of self-esteem played an important part in both physical attractiveness and occupational attainment. It has also been found that looking at this study at a gender perspective, that men appear to be more career-focused than women. Continuing with the dual-factor model by Nadkarni and Hofmann (2012) there are two needs for the usage of Facebook which are belonging and self-presentation. We see that in the second study by Seidman (2013) how personality can effect the usage of Facebook according to the Big Five.
Now talking about the method of this study there was an online survey answering questions about the usage of Facebook and their character according to the Big 5. The results have been as predicted saying that neurotic individuals were using Facebook as a safe-space to share their hidden-self whereas conscientious participants were more cautious and restrictive on their online profiles.
To conclude we can see that social media is a huge platform in our lives and is unique to every individual being. How we use it, how it effects us and also what we are more likely to focus on these social networking sites can vary from our personalities, gender maybe even more factors which will be dependent on further research on this topic.
