Citizen science resource mobilization: Social identities and textual narcissism

Abstract

Narcissism, as a form of self-awareness of self-importance or self-influence, can be characterized by a constant attention to success and the need for authority, competitiveness, and grandiose, which may be introduced to promote the attractiveness of a project. This study analyzes the effect of textual narcissism on the willingness to back citizen science projects by considering the social roles of the citizen project owners: expert, student, and amateur researchers. This paper uses social role theory to anchor the seven forms of narcissism and proposes 9 dimensions of narcissism, which are then classified into 3 categories: social role advantage, psychological superiority, and identity aspiration. Using a web crawler, 850 citizen science projects are employed as a corpus. Text mining is used to quantify the narratives, and econometric models are applied to estimate the effect of textual narcissism. This study reports that narcissism presents an inverted U-shaped effect. On social role, formal researchers (experts and students) receive lesser degrees of public tolerance to textual narcissism, over amateur researchers. By extending narcissistic influence and social role theory to citizen science, this paper can guide stakeholders and regulators such as scientific experiment platforms in generating suitable text descriptions for better research resource mobilization.