Narcissism and fame: a complex network model for the adaptive interaction of digital narcissism and online popularity

Abstract

Social media like Twitter or Instagram play the role of fertile platforms for self-exhibition and allow their users to earn a good repute. People higher in grandiosity share their contents in a charismatic way and as a result, they are successful in gaining attention from others, which may also influence their responses and behaviors. Such attention and repute enable them to be a trendsetter or a socially recognized maven. In this paper, we present a complex adaptive mental network model of a narcissist to see how popularity can adaptively influence his/her behavior. To analyze and to support behavior showed by our model, we used some key performance indicators from the literature to study the popularity and narcissism of 30 Instagram profiles. The results of the—both computational and empirical—study indicate that our presented computational adaptive network model in general shows the behavior found from the empirical data.