Last week I posted about Facebook’s odd idea that you are only supposed to Friend people you actually know in real life. Well, that policy appears to have informed this piece of research, because it concludes that you can tell who is a narcissist by looking at their Facebook profile. Because, you see, narcissists have many shallow relationships and non-narcissists have small numbers of deep relationships. So, um, all the well-known authors on Facebook are narcissists then?
5 thoughts on “The Perils of False Assumptions”
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Tricky.
Most of my Facebook friends are people I know in what I prefer to call “3-D” life.
Because I knew my girlfriend rather well before we met other than online. I have a few Facebook friends whom I know, but have never actually met.
And then I have a very small number of online acquaintances whom I don’t know well and haven’t met, and probably won’t, but they’re there for some reason. I also have students. I would like to start gradually shedding those, but I wish it didn’t send out notices.
Right. One of the many reasons people have lots of friends on Facebook is because they get friend requests from people they don’t know very well, or in our case maybe just met at a con, and they don’t like to turn them down. Ditto your students. Is it narcissistic to be unwilling to offend people you don’t know very well?
What I like are the Facebook Friend Recommendations. There are some people where we have like 5-6 friends in common, but I don’t actually know the person. The two of us don’t actually have enough in common to be friends, except those 5-6 people. May be if we meet at a party some time, we may BECOME friends. But we are not friends YET! I ignore the Facebook recommendations list a lot.
And I’ve actually had someone tell me that they are keeping their f-list in Facebook small and would not put me on their f-list. Ok, that’s fine by me.
People add and drop me all the time on LJ. I don’t let that concern me, except when they f-lock their journal and I was following what they were writing. Then I sigh but live with it.
If I wasn’t a narcissist who the heck would really like me??
Facebook isn’t about real friendship, though I’m puzzled when people who have my real addresses contact me there rather than the ‘personal’ way.
Justina:
I was about to say “I like you”, when I suddenly realized that the only time we have spent together had been at conventions, and for many people that won’t count as a “real” friendship. There may be an issue here in that in the past people’s friends tended to be people who lived locally, but these days they are often people who live far away that they interact with mainly online.
So yeah, Facebook may try to claim that you should only friend “real” friends whom you know well face-to-face, but who knows many people face-to-face these days? FtF relationships tend to be at work and/or college, both of which can be very transient.
As to why people contact you through Facebook even though they have your email address, I suspect it may come down to the odd ideas that people have as to what is “private”. For example, many people seem to be far more willing to comment on an open LiveJournal than on an ordinary blog, and I think some of that is that they think what happens in LiveJournal is somehow only visible in LiveJournal, whereas other things are “public”.