Does Social Media Make Us Narcissistic?

I used to hate posting anything. Photos especially. Being looked at at all, really.

Now I post a picture of myself most weeks. Half the time it’s me bragging about something I’ve done, and occasionally I get paid for it.

Somewhere along the way I worked out which of my posts perform, without ever sitting down and deciding to. It’s the ones where I’m doing well at something. So that’s what I put up now. And I like myself slightly less for it.

So which is it? Was I always this vain, and social media just handed me somewhere to put it? Or does social media do this to people — to content creators most of all?

I don’t mean narcissistic in the clinical sense. I mean it the way you’d say it about a friend who’s started posting a lot about their gym progress. Vain. Self-absorbed. A bit too into how they’re coming across.

I think the answer is yes, social media does it to you. Just not for the reason I assumed, and not in a way that’s my fault, or yours.

Yes. But you didn’t start vain.

The lazy version of this argument is that social media attracts vain people and the rest of us are being dragged along. I want to kill that one first, because it’s wrong and it’s also just a way of feeling superior to your own feed.

In 2025 some researchers in Utrecht ran a neat experiment. 312 people, each given a personal event, split at random. Half imagined telling a friend about it. Half imagined posting it. Then they measured how positively each group described the exact same thing.

Basically no difference.

Which is kind of obvious in hindsight? People show off to their friends. People show off in interviews. People show off when your aunt asks how your year’s been and you pick the good half to tell her. Nobody needed an app for this.

But look at what that study actually measured: one event, once. How you’d frame a thing if you were framing it.

It didn’t measure how often you do it. And it definitely didn’t measure what happens to you after you get rewarded for doing it, over and over, for years.

That gap is the whole essay.

Because everyone has a self-promoting sliver. For most people it stays small, because nothing offline is feeding it — you do it at a wedding, in an interview, on a first date, and then you go weeks without doing it at all. There’s no mechanism pushing that sliver to grow. Nobody’s paying you.

Social media found the sliver and started paying.

That’s the actual claim, and it’s not “we were all secretly vain.” It’s that a small normal part of an ordinary person gets isolated, rewarded on a schedule, and slowly trained into a bigger part. You don’t get corrupted. You get conditioned, in increments too small to notice while they’re happening.

I know because I watched it happen to me.

Social media doesn’t reward good posts. It rewards whatever got a reaction.

Here’s the mechanic, and it’s not clever at all.

You post a bunch of stuff. Some of it gets a reaction. The stuff that gets a reaction, you post more of. The stuff that gets nothing, you stop posting.

Not deliberately. You just stop. It doesn’t feel like strategy, it feels like finding your voice.

We know it’s a loop and not a personality because someone actually measured it. In 2021 Brady, Crockett and Van Bavel took 7,331 Twitter users and 12.7 million tweets and asked: what happens to someone after they post something angry and get rewarded for it?

They post angrier stuff. Consistently. Bigger reward, bigger shift.

They also found people drift towards whatever their corner of the internet already sounds like. So you don’t just learn “anger works” — you learn the specific temperature of your room, and then you become it.

And somebody has actually measured the rate. A meta-analysis found every extra moral or emotional word in a post is worth roughly 12% more engagement. You can feel how fast that compounds:

Nobody in that dataset woke up and decided to become worse. They were getting fed, and they adjusted. (Which is what anything alive does when you feed it.)

Same machine, different output: bragging on TikTok, bullying on Threads

This is the bit I had completely wrong at first.

I used to think TikTok rewarded showing off and X didn’t, because TikTok comments are mostly nice and X comments really aren’t.

Nope. TikTok is full of failure content, self-deprecating content, entire genres built on “I am a mess.” If you only look at what gets posted, the platforms look way more similar than you’d expect.

The difference isn’t what gets posted. It’s what the replies do to you afterwards.

That same Utrecht study accidentally found this too — posts written for X came out significantly more negative in tone than posts written for Instagram or Facebook. Same people, same events, different room.

Research on TikTok comments found most videos aren’t toxic and the moderation catches the worst of what piles up underneath (though the comments still run darker than the videos themselves).

Threads got built the other way. Short text, public replies, quote-and-dunk mechanics, moderation that hasn’t caught up. It copied X’s shape, so it got X’s behaviour.

If you’re Malaysian you’ve watched this happen in your own language. MCMC logged 8,339 cyberbullying complaints between January and November 2025 — and new Penal Code amendments criminalising it kicked in that July, which tells you how bad it had to get first.

Now stick Brady’s finding next to that. Engagement teaches. Where achievements get rewarded, people learn to post achievements. Where cruelty gets rewarded, people learn to be cruel.

Same loop, same species. The app decides what comes out the other end.

So this isn’t a fact about human nature. It’s a design decision, made by specific people, who could’ve decided differently.

It never feels like a decision

I want to be specific about what this actually feels like, because the abstract version hides it.

It’s not that I sit down and go “time to brag.”

It’s that I’ve got two things I could post — one’s a win, one’s a Tuesday — and I already know exactly which one is going to sit there getting nothing. So I post the win. It’s that I’ve started shaping things into achievements while they’re still happening to me. It’s that a good day now comes with a little second thought attached, which is this would post well.

That second thought is the thing I actually mind. Not the posting. The fact that something got installed behind my eyes and now runs by itself.

I feel more self-absorbed than I used to be. I don’t think I became a more self-absorbed person. I think I got trained — and I got paid during the training, which made it really hard to notice.

The posts nobody sees are the ones you needed

Here’s what the loop costs everyone who’s just reading.

The boring post doesn’t get punished. That’d be easier to spot, and easier to be angry about. It just gets nothing. So it stops getting made — by me, by you, by everyone at once, without a single one of us ever discussing it.

What’s left is the highlights.

Easier to see than to describe. Here’s a month of posting — a normal mix, the sort of thing anyone would actually put out. Hit play and watch what survives.

Nothing in there got censored. Nothing got punished. The posts just quietly got nothing, which is so much more effective.

So social media isn’t a distorted picture of people’s lives. It’s a completely accurate picture of a filtered sample, and the filter was tuned for exactly the stuff that’ll make you feel behind.

Someone measured this too, back in 2012. Chou and Edge surveyed 425 students and found that the more time people spent on Facebook, the more they agreed other people were happier than them — and the less they agreed that life is fair.

The mechanism is just two boring mental shortcuts doing their job. First, you judge how common something is by how easily you can think of an example, and social media has made other people’s success incredibly easy to think of. Second, when you see someone’s good news, you explain it with who they are rather than where they were standing.

Which is how you end up measuring your entire life against someone’s best week and deciding the gap says something about you.

But I can’t tell you the bragging is the problem

One thing keeps stopping me writing the clean, angry version of this essay.

A while back I saw a girl thanking a stranger for posting about studying abroad. Not annoyed at them. Thanking them. Because until that post turned up on her screen she genuinely hadn’t known it was a thing someone like her could do.

Same content. Literally the same content. Someone’s win, posted for engagement, doing numbers because it’s aspirational.

For her it was a map.

Most people never find out what’s actually available to them. You inherit your sense of what’s possible from whoever happens to be near you, and if nobody near you has done a thing, it may as well not exist. For a lot of people, the bragging is the only crack of light that ever gets in.

So no, I’m not going to tell you to stop posting your achievements. They’re holding something up.

The problem is you only ever see where someone ended up. Never how they got there.

Not the years it took, not the rejections, not the money behind it, the parents, the luck, the four things that failed first. Just the result — and then you’re left explaining to yourself why you’re not there yet.

And when every field’s destination shows up in the same ten minutes of scrolling, something happens to your sense of where you stand that nobody’s had to deal with before.

That’s the next one.

Part 1 of two. Part 2 is You’re Comparing Yourself To A Person Who Doesn’t Exist.

Sources

• Positive self-presentation online vs offline: Unveiling the Positivity Bias on Social Media: A Registered Experimental Study, Collabra: Psychology, 2025
• Outrage reinforcement: Brady, McLoughlin, Doan & Crockett, How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks, Science Advances, 2021
• Perceptions of others’ lives: Chou & Edge, “They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am”, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 2012
• TikTok comment toxicity: Harassment in TikTok Comments, Cyberbullying Research Center, 2023
• Malaysian complaint figures: MCMC, via reporting on the 2025 Penal Code amendments