For the average narcissist, Facebook “offers a gateway for hundreds of shallow relationships and emotionally detached communication.” More importantly for this study, social networking in general allows the user a great deal of control over how he or she is presented to and perceived by peers and other users.

The study postulated that narcissists would show more overall Facebook activity than average users and that their activity would be more self-promotional, either descriptively or superficially. The survey’s results showed “significant positive correlations between narcissism and self-promotional content in the following areas: Main Photo, View Photos , Status Updates and Notes.”

People who scored higher on the study’s narcissism test also spent more time on Facebook and checked it more times each day than their less narcissistic counterparts.

I call this the smart biped paradox: once you are an upright ape, all natural selection pressures should be in favour of retaining a small cranium. That’s because walking upright means having a narrower pelvis, capping babies’ head size, and a shorter digestive tract, making it harder to support big, energy-hungry brains. Clearly our big brains did evolve, but I think Darwin had the wrong mechanism. I believe it was technology. We were never fully biological entities. We are and always have been artificial apes.