Institute of Art Design + Technology
Dún Laoghaire

Melissa Murphy 

BSc [Hons] Applied Psychology

Initially, I was interested in persona shifting that may occur depending on the social sphere a person finds themselves in e.g., work, or around friends, but I also was curious to see how that extended to online spaces. Social media and the online sphere have become such a large part of our lives, and many might not be able to picture a life without it. Despite this, there was very little research in the area, therefore I took it upon myself to investigate this, as there are many factors that are unique to online spaces that offline interactions do not.

Project Description

This study investigated the relationship between self-presentation adaptiveness and personality presentation (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness), on Instagram and BeReal by means of a cross-sectional, between and within groups design. An online questionnaire was administered to 137 participants (53 men, 78 women, 5 non-binary, 1 preferred not to specify). They completed the Adaptable Self subscale of the Presentation of Online Self Scale for Adults. Participants subsequently completed the Ten Item Personality Inventory twice, once for Instagram presentation, and once for BeReal. Five one-way analyses of variance found no significant relationship between self-adaptiveness and differences in presentation of the Big Five traits between Instagram and BeReal. Five paired sample t-tests found a significant difference in presentation of openness between Instagram and BeReal. No significant difference was observed between Instagram and BeReal in the case of the other four personality traits.