Social Media Addiction and Empathy: Moderating impact of personality traits among high school students

Potential addiction to social media is one of the problems that some people, especially adolescents, are facing. For this reason, many studies have been conducted in this field in recent years. There is no research investigating how empathy is associated with excessive and problematic online social media use, whilst some studies have associated social media use with empathy as the main component of social development. Hence, the purpose of this study is to examine the influences of Empathic Concern (EC) and Perspective Taking (PT) on social media addiction (SMA). Moreover, prior studies revealed that Internet addiction behavior of individuals varies according to differences in personality traits. Accordingly, we further intend to understand how the impacts of EC and PT on SMA are intensified by considering individuals' traits differences, and thus, personality traits were included in the research model as the moderators. To assess the research model, the data collected through the distributed printed questionnaire among 592 high-school 15-18 years old students (42.1% male) were analyzed utilizing the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach. The results revealed that both EC and PT significantly and negatively predict SMA. Furthermore, the moderating analysis showed that Extraversion negatively moderated the relationships between EC and SMA and PT and SMA. Further analysis revealed that while there were no differences across genders, behaviors associated with SMA were more common among students of high-income schools in contrast to low-income schools. Implications of the study are further discussed.