Why is the Followers-to-Following Ratio so Important?

The impact of social media exposure on various aspects of users’ personality and mental health has become a popular topic for psychological research over the past ten years. Instagram provides users with numbers indicating how many accounts they follow and how many accounts follow them. This ratio carries social status, in that someone with more followers than people they follow could be viewed as a more popular user. The current study explores the relationship between Instagram use, user popularity, the Big 5 personality traits, self-esteem, histrionic tendencies, and narcissistic tendencies in a sample of 125 undergraduates. We hypothesized that users with larger follower-to-following ratios would have lower self-esteem, and higher narcissistic and histrionic tendencies. There were few significant correlations between the personality traits and followers-to-following ratios, suggesting that more research is needed in order to determine the impact that an individual’s personality has on the amount of attention and effort they spend on their ratio