Men and women whose Facebook and Twitter feeds are filled with selfies tend to significantly overestimate their attractiveness and likability, and are typically viewed being more narcissistic than those who don’t frequently take photos of themselves, according to a new study.
Writing in a recent edition of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, Daniel Re, a psychologist from the University of Toronto, and his colleagues conducted a study to find out if there was a link between taking selfies and a phenomenon known as “self-favoring bias”, where a person believes that they are better than average in many ways.
According to PsyPost and the Daily Mail, they interviewed 198 college students, 100 of whom said that they regularly took selfies and 98 of whom said that they rarely or never used a phone or other mobile device to take pictures of themselves. Study participants were asked to take one selfie using a smartphone camera, and also had their photo taken by one of the researchers.
Each of the images were rated by the students themselves and by an independent third party, and while both the selfie takers and the non-selfie takers tended to rate themselves higher in terms of attractiveness and likability than the third-party raters, the authors found that regular selfie-takers overestimated themselves significantly more and were judged to be more vain.
So what is it about taking selfies that leads to this bias?
The results of the study indicate that regularly snapping photos of yourself could increase your susceptibility to self-favoring bias, causing you to unwittingly overestimate how attractive your photos are over the course of time. This effect, the researchers explained, may be due to positive feedback received over social media, or the use of strategies to take flattering photos.
In addition, Re and his colleagues wrote that their research found that “selfie-takers perceived themselves as more attractive and likable in their selfies than in others’ photos, but that non-selfie-takers viewed both photos similarly. Furthermore, external judges rated the targets as less attractive, less likable, and more narcissistic in their selfies than in the photos taken by others.”
Essentially, they believe that “self-enhancing misperceptions may support selfie-takers’ positive evaluations of their selfies, revealing notable biases in self-perception,” and that becoming good at taking selfies could increase the likelihood of others viewing them negatively, at least when it comes to narcissism, according to PsyPost.
The new findings come on the heels of an Ohio State University study published last year which found that men who posted more selfies on social media sites like Facebook and Instrgam scored higher on measures of narcissism and psychopathy, and that guys who edited those self-portraits before posting them scored higher in narcissism and self-objectification. Based on the science, it might be wise to think twice before shooting and sharing those self-portraits.
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Image credit: Thinkstock
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