Revisiting the social enhancement hypothesis: Extroversion indirectly predicts number of Facebook friends operating through Facebook usage

An online survey of college-age Facebook users (N = 209) found that extroversion, narcissism, openness, and agreeableness predicted friending more people on Facebook. However, only extroversion continued to exert an effect when these and other personality variables were examined together in one regression model, while controlling for frequency of Facebook usage and gender. Also, a path analysis model showed that extroversion directly predicted number of Facebook friends and the number of months people were active on Facebook. In addition, extroversion indirectly influenced number of Facebook friends, operating through months active on Facebook and hours per week spent on Facebook in a parallel mediation effect. Findings offer support for the social enhancement hypothesis, which argues that extroverted people benefit the most from social media. Researchers for decades have tried to understand how personality shapes social interactions among people. Social-networking sites, such as Facebook, offer an opportunity to study these interactions. Research has found that personality shapes how people communicate online, much as it does offline (e.g. Amichai-Hamburger & Vinitzky, 2010; Back et al., 2010). Based on this foundation, it is well established that personality has an effect in how people use social-networking sites. However, what has received less study is how this effect plays out – what path does this effect takes? This current study used a survey of college-age Facebook users (N = 209) to begin to fill this gap by exploring a mediation model that explains how personality and Facebook usage predict number of Facebook friends. To create this model, this study drew on personality theory and the social enhancement hypothesis, which argues that people who are popular offline complement this popularity online (Kraut et al. However, no earlier studies have directly tested a mediation model that examines the effect of personality on friending mediated by how frequently people use Facebook. Therefore, this study offered new knowledge about the role personality plays in human behavior by moving beyond merely describing the influence to explaining its path in the microcosm of a social-networking site. First, I offer a brief history of the role of friending on Facebook. Then I review the literature on how personality theory and the social enhancement hypothesis have been applied to social media to show support for the hypotheses and research question in this study. Then I outline how the proposed model was tested and explain how the results fit existing literature and expand knowledge of …