Discussion
This work examined whether self-esteem would correlate with OSN activity above and beyond its associations with personality traits and attitudes toward them. There were three groups of results. The first group relates to Hypothesis 1, which presumed that users’ extraversion and attitudes toward it eliminate the association between positive self-esteem and those OSN indicators that relate to users’ popularity. The current findings confirmed these expectations: Extraversion eliminated the links between self-esteem and two popularity indicators―the number of friends and likes received by users’ portraits. In particular, these findings demonstrate that the previously obtained meta-analytical association between selfesteem and the number of friends (Liu & Baumeister, 2016) can be a result of a positive covariation between self-esteem and extraversion. Extraversion can encourage users to employ OSN as a source for communication with others (Ryan & Xenos, 2011; Marshall et al., 2015). In the long run, extraversion can underlie users’ popularity, but not high self-esteem itself. The second group of findings relates to Hypothesis 2, which presumed that neuroticism and users’ attitude toward neuroticism are responsible for the association between negative selfesteem and OSN indicators of users’ self-validation. These hypotheses have been rejected in two ways. First, neither neuroticism nor attitudes toward neuroticism could eliminate the association between negative self-esteem and increased number of impersonal avatars―the only selfvalidation indicator that correlated with self-esteem. Hence, in cases like this, low self-esteem can be a predictor of increased self-validation OSN activity above and beyond any individual differences in neuroticism.
