Thursday, April 19, 2018

The go-to gal for on-line relationships

Ohio State has an interesting site devoted to statistics about faculty, rank, staff, ethnicities with a link to the twenty most popular professors for expert advice, appearing as talking heads on TV news shows, in topical information websites and popular magazines.  In the area of video games and social media people turn to an assistant professor in the arts and sciences, Jesse Fox who describes her research as—“how our online selves and social interactions influence our offline identities, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, including relationship initiation, development, maintenance, and dissolution.” So I looked at her research the public might come across—like a dating website Dating Advice dot com.  Apparently we’re all narcissists on social media. Hmm, what about professors who appear before thousands on TV?  All that appears on the FAR (Faculty Annual Review) which goes before the Promotion and Tenure committee.

“In the publication titled “The Dark Triad and Trait Self-Objectification as Predictors of Men’s Use and Self-Presentation Behaviors on Social Networking Sites,” Fox used data from an online survey that consisted of 1,000 American men aged 18 to 40.

Her main goal was to look at their representations on social networking sites, as well as the role of “the dark triad of personalities,” which includes narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.

She had three major findings:

  • Trait self-objectification and narcissism predicted time spent on social networking sites.
  • Narcissism and psychopathy predicted the number of selfies posted on social networking sites.
  • Narcissism and trait self-objectification predicted editing photos posted on social networking sites.

“All of that stuff is highly relevant to online dating,” she said.”

No comments: