The effect of social media on narcissism and empathy among Saudis

Social media is one of the most visited platforms for users to share public content and exchange personal stories though sensational and private posts (Refaee and Rieser, 2014). Despite the importance to connect with other users from different cultures, backgrounds and countries, misconducted behaviors may happen in these social networks. For instance, cyberbullying (Mouheb et al., 2019), violence (Patton et al., 2014), racism (Dubrofsky and Wood, 2014), and lack of empathy (Vossen and Valkenburg, 2016) with different users have been reported. According to many studies, the impact of receiving negative feedback has huge influence on mental health and wellbeing for the social media users (Scott et al., 2020). A quantitative method is to be used in this study to understand how users self-reflect on their empathy and wellbeing thru the theoretical lens of narcissism in social media in the Saudi context. To fully capture the aspects of narcissism, empathy, wellbeing and social media, many Saudi users from different areas in the countries are invited to participate in an online survey. According to the literature review, little is known about the impact of narcissism and empathy on wellbeing in the context of social networks (Errasti et al., 2017; Morelli et al., 2017). More importantly, to the best of the authors knowledge, there is no study that has investigated the impact of narcissism and empathy on wellbeing for social media users in the Arab context. In fact, mental health studies are scarce in the Middle Eastern area. As mental health issues are deemed to be a stigma in the developed world, it is considered to be even worse in the developing countries (Clement et al., 2015). This may explain why such topics are not being studied in the Middle East context.