Hooked

Chapter 14

The psych of like

Jean Twenge has discovered something that may not be a surprise to most of us: we are becoming more narcissistic.¹ For example, one of the studies found that the narcissism score for recent survey respondents was 30% higher than those in the 1980s.² Another experiment gives a clue as to why this might be: participants completed a standard measure of narcissism after either editing their MySpace profile or using Google Maps, and, as you may have guessed, the former group scored higher on narcissism.³

The fact is that social media (and the internet) is becoming such a huge part of our lives that it is changing who we are: in fact, it is literally rewiring our brains.⁴ An estimated 500 million Tweets are sent every day, ...