Main titles

“There has been plenty of research on how the interaction of certain personality traits affects addiction to things like alcohol and drugs. We wanted to apply a similar framework to social networking addiction.” - Isaac Vaghefi, assistant professor of management information systems at Binghampton University.

• Three broad personality domains were found to be related to social network addiction, neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness.
• The other two broad domains of the Big5 personality model, extraversion, and openess to experience did not play much of a role in the likelihood of developing social network addiction.
• Personality traits interact with one other when it comes to the likelihood of developing social network addiction.
• Neuroticism and conscientiousness had individually positive and negative roles in the likelihood of developing addiction. The more neurotic the greater the probability and the more conscientious, the less the probability.
• When an individual tested high on both variables, then neuroticism seemed to moderate the effects of conscientiousness. Therefore a conscientious person who also scored high in neuroticism would still be vulnerable to developing a social network addiction.
• Agreeableness on its own had little affect on the probability of developing addiction, however low levels of both agreeableness and conscientiousness amplified the probability.
• In addition, and contrary to what would be expected, high levels of both agreeableness and conscietiousness increased the probability of developing addiction.

Study: Binghampton University