Other news of the day – you can analyse Facebook profiles to see if people are narcissists. Laura Buffardi, doctoral student in psychology, and associate professor W. Keith Campbell from the University of Georgia note:

Not everyone who uses Facebook is a narcissist. “We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others,” said Buffardi.

They gave personality questionnaires to nearly 130 Facebook users, analyzed the content of the pages and had untrained strangers view the pages and rate their impression of the owner’s narcissism.

The researchers found that the number of Facebook friends and wallposts that individuals have on their profile pages correlates with narcissism. Buffardi said this is consistent with how narcissists behave in the real-world, with numerous yet shallow relationships. Narcissists are also more likely to choose glamorous, self-promoting pictures for their main profile photos, she said, while others are more likely to use snapshots.

Two immediate thoughts of course:

– It won’t just be Facebook – this behaviour is visible on any social network, Twitter is becoming increasingly notorious

– The emerging science of social graphology will be able to (is already able to in fact) analyse a lot more than just narcissism.

A Twitter narcissm index would be very amusing – can’t be that hard to do methinks – measure followed, measure posts, scrape blog & analyse memes…… I suspect we all know the answers anyway