The online and offline identities of influencers in the light of narcissistic personality traits, perfectionism and perfectionistic self-presentation

With the development of internet technology, social media influencers who have many followers have online identities that they reflect to their followers in addition to their real-life identities have emerged. The overall aim of the current study was to examine whether the identities that influencers reflect on social media deviate from their real-life identities or not. If there was a discrepancy between online and offline identities, this study also aimed to determine to what extent the narcissistic characteristics, perfectionism and perfectionistic self-presentation behaviors of the influencers relate to the difference between their online and offline identities. The data was collected through several questionnaires (the Sociodemographic Information form, the Big Five Personality Traits scale, the Narcissistic Personality inventory, the Hypersensitive Narcissism scale, the Multidimensional Perfectionism and the Perfectionistic Self-Presentation scale) filled out by 48 influencers. The results of this study indicated that there was a discrepancy between the online and offline identities of influencers' personality traits of openness, conscientious, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. As influencers' fragile narcissism increased, the difference between identities in conscientiousness and extraversion increased and the difference in neuroticism decreased. For perfectionism and self-presentation, positive relationships were found based on the subtypes of narcissism. However, the fact that the reliability values of the Five Factor Personality Scale, which was considered as one of the biggest limitations of the study, were extremely low, was of great importance when evaluating the results. Considering the reasons for low reliability values, discrepancy between the identities of influencers may be the unique dynamics of social media and the need for future studies to have a better understanding of these dynamics was discussed. Keywords: Social Media, Influencer, Identity, Narcissism, Perfectionism