The moderating role of narcissism in predicting the behavior intention of the Palestinian university students towards adopting the new Facebook currency

This paper aims to identify the factors affecting university students’ behavioral intentions towards adopting the new Facebook currency while controlling for the direct and the moderating impacts of narcissism.

A self-administered questionnaire of 344 respondents from six major Palestinian universities was analyzed. The structural model is fitted for assessing the hypothesized relations.

Findings indicate that the effect of Facebook advertisement in predicting the behavioral intentions to adopt the new Facebook currency relies on: privacy, security, the expectations in the new Facebook currency and knowledge about the targeting options within the Facebook platform. Moreover, the moderating role of narcissism supported the relationships between perceived privacy, the expectations in the new Facebook currency and knowledge about the targeting options within the Facebook platform but did not support the moderating role of narcissism in the relationships between perceived security and the behavioral intentions.

In this study, only the Facebook platform and the behavioral intention were investigated with data collected from Palestinian University students through self-reported cross-sectional survey.

This study adds insight on the moderating role of narcissism in predicting the behavior intentions towards adopting the new Facebook currency (Diem) which has a substantial potential to threaten all other crypto currencies and the other alternatives. Therefore, managers should consider altering or adapting their Facebook advertising tactics accordingly.

This study is the first to contribute through empirical evidence from a developing country to theory building the results of clarifying the propensity to adopt the new Facebook currency, outlining the consumers’ reaction to social media advertising and its influential factors and providing evidence proving relevance of narcissism for non-Western users.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-12-2021-0666