Abstract—Inappropriate self-disclosure has created many issues in both the cyberspace and the real society that are primarily due to the weakening of social inhibition resulted from the characteristics of the Internet. The present study explored the impact of personality traits of social network users on their social inhibition awareness in self-disclosure and further investigated whether such kind of awareness would also influence the extent of users’ self-disclosure. The present study conducted a survey on 216 social network users with self-disclosure experience in Guangdong Province of Mainland China. The results indicated that some personality traits will indeed significantly impact social inhibition awareness and that social inhibition awareness will also lower users’ willingness to engage in self-disclosure.

Index Terms—Self-disclosure, social inhibition, big five personality.

The authors are with Nanfang College of Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China (Email: xiaoyz@mail.nfu.edu.cn).

Cite: Yu-Chung Hsiao, Zi-Shan Zeng, "Impact of Big Five Personality Traits on Social Inhibition Awareness and Extent of Self-disclosure," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 400-406, 2019.