Facebook,narcism, leadership and the current crisis

Are you on Facebook?

May be spending hours and hours on either designing your website, leaving messages on your friends' site, sending out flowers, fighting battles with werewolves and others?

Or are you the more casual user, checking in every now and then, but otherwise, you are more quiet?

Let's be a bit tongue in cheek, if I may!

A study now links narcissism to Facebook users.

"Researchers at the University of Georgia gave personality questionnaires to nearly 130 Facebook users and analyzed the content of their online profiles. They also had untrained observers look at the profiles and rate how narcissistic, or excessively egotistical, the owners of the profiles were.

The results of the study are detailed in the October issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The researchers found that the number of friends and wall posts (messages left by the owner of the profile or friends) that a person had on their profile correlated with how narcissistic they were. Study leader Laura Buffardi, a Ph.D. student in psychology, said this is similar to how narcissists behave in the real world, forming numerous but shallow relationships with others.

Narcissistic Facebook users were also more likely to have glamorous, self-promoting pictures for their main profile photo, while others tended to use snapshots, the study found. The untrained observers also noted the differences in photos and amount of social interaction."

Isn't it interesting?

Are you now going to change your picture, your approach to Facebook, or do you bask in glory, saying, that this is alright like that?

But don't worry and whatever you do - another study found that narcists tend to become leaders. And this sheds a totally new light on Facebook, right?

May be companies can start sourcing their candidates from Facebook - which would presume, again, that narcissists are able to lead.

Are they? .... I read, somewhere, that they are not. And the lead researcher of the study also states that "it's not surprising that narcissists become leaders. They like power, they are egotistical, and they are usually charming and extraverted. But the problem is, they don't necessarily make better leaders."

Sorry! So may be this is the explanation for the current financial crisis? May be and this is just my piece here, leaders were to narcissistic in reaching short-term gains, to please Wall Street, so that they didn't care less about the reliability of their business model or if the lending structure was sustainable? I am guessing only, and I am not an expert of the financial crisis, just thinking about it :)

But whatever it is - communication is important. And Facebook together with other social websites are changing the ways we communicate.

(By Asia Mind Dynamics)

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Asia Mind Dynamics organises new courses on:
1.) The NLP Certified Practitioner and Time Line Therapy (TM) Course


Fifth course in 2008: November 13-16, November 21-23 and November 28-30 2008

________________________________________________________________________
For more information, click this link, call 6-012 - 287 5048 (Andreas) or send an email to andreas.dorn AT gmail.com

See you soon!!