Big five and usage of the “VK” online social network

The relation between Big Five personality traits and the Vk.com online social network (OSN) use on a large undergraduate sample (n=1079) has been studied. To investigate OSN usage, 12 behavioral indicators were extracted and used. It was found that extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness each are important independent predictors of various behavioral OSN indicators including number of friends, number of wall posts, number of photos, number of likes related to personal photos, and the like. The effects of agreeableness are still questionable for they were revealed on just one of the two Big Five measures used, International Personality Items Pool, but not for the Big Five Inventory. The effects of openness to experience have been mainly mediated by extraversion with the exception of number of written posts made by a user. The effects of conscientiousness were most specific ones emerging solely as a characteristic of avatars: Conscientiousness was positively related to number of avatars depicting the user, and negatively to number of avatars substituting photos of a user with something else like photos (pictures) of animals, an abstract, other people, and so forth. Generally speaking, behavioral activity in the OSN increased when either extraversion or neuroticism were high. Note that these two effects have been mutually independent. Moreover, extraversion was the only trait differentiated users (n=993) from non-users, i.e., those participants whose Vk profile was not found.