Social media usage has skyrocketed in the recent past due to the escalating availability of numerous social media platforms that sprouted with the onset of digitization. Individual personality traits play a significant role in consuming content that is available within the social media arena. Therefore agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness are the five important personality traits at the center of social media consumption. They are of immense benefit in shaping how and why many individuals utilize social media in their daily lives. This essay examines how the five personality factors relate with motive, self-actualization and trait psychological theories to figure the escalating behavior of social media usage.
Personality Traits Associated with Social Media Usage
According to Alan and Kabadayi (2016), agreeableness, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism are the big five personality characters that impact the usage of social media platforms. The trait perspective theory can be of immense use in understanding some of these personality elements. The theory explicate personality regarding interior features that are believed to influence human behavior. For instance, introversion and extraversion are fundamental traits that this perspective underscores to be significantly shaping social media usage behavior. Extraversion is a trait that entails intense adventurousness and talkativeness. Therefore, extroverts find it easy to develop social capital as they can easily make friends and mingle with many people at a go. Moreover, extroverts can focus their energies on outside society since they find it easy to interact. On the other hand, introverts usually tend to focus on themselves because they have profound shyness that obstructs them from easily interacting with others. Agreeableness is a personality trait that embodies altruism. People with this kind of personality element tend towards being mindful of the needs of other individuals to the extent of sacrificing their own. Moreover, such persons obtain enormous pleasure from tending to the wishes of other people. In brief, they demonstrate utmost empathy to their fellows. Life satisfaction a time acts as the impetus to the adoption of a particular personality trait. Maslow’s theory of needs is one of the potent models that are relevant in motivation psychology. Maslow highlighted self-actualization as one of the fundamental steps for attaining satisfaction in his model. The self-actualization perspective refers to the drive to attain an individual’s highest capability.
According to Ali (2019), the desire to obtain maximum gratification in social media can follow the root of bottom-up and top-down. So, people with the agreeableness personality characteristic usually embrace the bottom-up model because they value other people’s needs more than their own and aspire to lift them to the highest level of life satisfaction. The openness personality factor captures individuals with the drive to be open-minded and accept novel ideas, experiences, and things that can impact their lives. Moreover, open-minded people are very fast in thinking since they are innovative and can create meaningful connections. Their critical thinking abilities enable them to provide solutions to some of the most challenging life experiences. Neuroticism is also a pivotal personality element that influences social media usage. Alan and Kabadayi (2016) posit that neuroticism is a trait that measures how different people have control over their emotions. The scholars underscore that low-level neuroticism is a manifestation of efficient control of individual emotions. Likewise, high-ranking neuroticism shows that people have the art to properly control emotions but still exhibit sensitivity and anxiety that causes too much worry. Hughes et al. (2012) define conscientiousness as a personality trait that makes people vulnerable to top-notch integrity, tidiness, orderliness, and ethical susceptibility.
The Influence of Personality Factors on Social Media Consumption
The traits above play a key role in determining how and why most people use social media. Firstly, agreeableness positively and negatively influences social media consumption. People with high agreeableness tend to utilize social media in regulated quantities because they believe that such platforms distract other fundamental duties. Secondly, extroverts are highly likely to utilize social media in extreme cases because they’re open to making new friends. In this regard, they are passionate about messaging other people, which is a common occurrence in social media applications. Moreover, they have numerous friends available on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which compels them to access them. The motive perspective denotes some of the reasons that make an individual develop the urge to participate in a given endeavor. Therefore, extroverts are motivated by the need to communicate with pals online and can never imagine avoiding social media. Thirdly, conscientiousness. Individuals with high scores on this personality trait exhibit utmost organizational and leadership competencies. Consequently, they shun social media because they believe that such platforms contain unnecessary information that can divert them from fundamental goals. So, there is a negative correlation between social media consumption and the conscientiousness personality factor.
Fourthly, Neuroticism. According to Gil de Zúñiga et al. (2017), neuroticism influences social media consumption via emotional stability. The scholars underscore that emotional stability is a manifestation of maximum control over emotions, contrasting to pessimism and depression. So, persons with minimal emotional stability exhibit psychological traits with too many worries and anxiety. Consequently, they consume Media technologies with regards to their amounts of loneliness or extraversion. The bottom line is that people with diminished levels of control over emotions seek social media as a medium for obtaining attention. On the other hand, persons with top-notch control of emotions exhibit a lower tendency to access social media because they don’t require any other attention obtained in the social media arena.
Lastly, the openness personality trait also influences social media consumption both positively and negatively. People with high openness scores usually exhibit curiosity that prompts them to seek novel information and communication mechanics. In this regard, they embrace social media platforms since they believe they are significant avenues to obtaining these novel concepts. Additionally, they are open to novel life experiences, which they only believe is accessible when they enroll in social media platforms. On the other hand, persons with low openness scores develop a diminished tendency to consume social media content because they see no value of such platforms in influencing their life experiences to acquire new perspectives.
In a nutshell, the onset of digitization has made social media a powerful tool for accomplishing most of the current life motives. Personality traits like conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness, extraversion, and agreeableness that are often regarded as the Big five personality elements play a pivotal role in determining the quantities to which most people consume social media content. High and low scores on these personality traits are what figures the urge to access social media. People with high scores usually have a high appetite for social media, while those with low scores are less likely to access social media. Social media play a central role in creating social networks that can immensely benefit organizations and people. Therefore, understanding these personality traits is of paramount importance.
References
Alan, A. K., & Kabadayı, E. T. (2016). The effect of personal factors on social media usage of young consumers. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 235, 595-602.
Ali, I. (2019). Personality traits, individual innovativeness and satisfaction with life. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, 4(1), 38-46.
Gil de Zúñiga, H., Diehl, T., Huber, B., & Liu, J. (2017). Personality traits and social media use in 20 countries: How personality relates to frequency of social media use, social media news use, and social media use for social interaction. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 20(9), 540-552.
Hughes, D. J., Rowe, M., Batey, M., & Lee, A. (2012). A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage. Computers in human behavior, 28(2), 561-569.
