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Social network sites (SNS) addiction is a research area with extensive research due to its implications on various domains of functioning, such as users’ psychological well-being (e.g. Lee et al., 2015). The ubiquitous SNS have attracted users from different age group, including those from younger age such as adolescents, due to rapid development of communication technology (Sampasa-Kanyinga & Lewis, 2015). Due to the vulnerability of this age group, research has extensively examine the impact of these ubiquitous online platforms on adolescents. Empirical findings revealed that users from this age group are vulnerable to SNS addiction (Błachnio & Przepiorka, 2016a; Błachnio et al., 2015; Jafarkarimi et al., 2016), and that adolescents are more likely to develop SNS addiction than young adults (Jafarkarimi et al., 2016). Consequently, risk factors of SNS addiction amongst young users have been important scopes for empirical research. The vast literature implies that personality traits are common indicators of SNS usages (e.g. Ross et al., 2009), including vulnerability to SNS addiction (e.g. Błachnio & Przepiorka, 2016a). In this light, this research focuses on the relationship of personality and SNS addiction, with adolescents as the sample.
Despite the vulnerability of adolescents, empirical research mainly focused on young adults (e.g. Andreassen et al., 2012) due to their availability as research participants. Thus, the present research addressed this gap by examining the significance of personality traits in predicting SNS addiction with adolescents. Specifically, this study focused on the significance of the Dark Triad in predicting SNS addiction since these traits are indicative of vulnerability to problematic use of SNS (Kircaburun et al., 2018) and SNS addiction (Chung et al., 2019, Lee, 2019), and possessed more predictive power than the conventional Five-Factor Model (Lee, 2019). The present study also posited the indirect effect impulsiveness on the relationship of the Dark Triad and SNS addiction among adolescents.
Personality Traits and SNS
Research on the influences of personality traits on the development of SNS usages and their problematic aspects remain significant since these findings are highly applicable to identify individuals who are vulnerable to heavy use of SNS (Amichai-Hamburger & Vinitzky, 2010). Despite the significance of the Five-Factor model, the small effect size accounted by these broad five domains implicate for their limited influence on SNS usage, pressing for investigation with other personality traits (Ross et al., 2009; Skues et al., 2012). Consequently, investigations have extended into subclinical traits such as narcissism (Andreassen et al., 2017; Casale et al., 2016), which significantly explained more variance of SNS addiction than the conventional Five-Factor model (e.g. Lee, 2019). From this line of research, there was a strong conceptual link of SNS addiction and impulsiveness, since this form of addiction was described as an irresistible urge (Hoffman et al., 2012). Subsequent empirical investigations have supported the conceptual link of impulsiveness and SNS addiction (Błachnio & Przepiorka, 2016b; Cudo et al., 2019; Delaney et al., 2018; Rothen et al., 2018; Turel & Qahri-Saremi, 2018; Wu et al., 2013). In light of this, highly impulsive individuals are prone to unrestraint use of SNS. Although significant results were found, the weak effect sizes accounted by these subclinical traits suggested that there are unaccounted traits with more influence. In the vast efforts to elaborate the conceptual links of personality traits and SNS usages, the influence of the Dark Triad has been widely investigated. Findings have supported that the Dark Triad accounted for additional variance above the Five-Factor model in predicting human values (Kajonius et al., 2015), social outcomes such as prejudice (Hodson et al., 2009; Koehn et al., 2019) and perceived attractiveness (Carter et al., 2014), and SNS addiction (Lee, 2019). These findings indicated that the Dark Triad traits exert greater influence on social behaviours over the Five-Factor model, highlighting the importance of these traits in addressing the limited influence of personality traits in predicting SNS usages (Ross et al., 2009; Skues et al., 2012).