Drop that selfie stick: you may be vainer than you think!
When ÖŰżÚζSM psychologist Daniel Re set out to study the habits of selfie-takers on social media, no amount of overestimation could have prepared him for the high opinions people seem to have of themselves online.
âIt was actually a lot of fun,â says the postdoctoral researcher, who collaborated with his undergraduate students on the study, titled âSelfie Indulgence: Self-Favoring Biases in Perceptions of Selfiesâ.
âThis was definitely more lighthearted than the things we usually observe,â he adds of the study, which found that âfrequent-selfie-takersâ rated their own selfies higher than other peopleâs opinion of those same selfies.
In-fact, according to the study, even selfie-takers who claimed they disliked the narcissism they associated with other peopleâs selfies still rated their own selfies higher than anyone else rated them.
âThat was a real surprise,â Re says. âThey seem to be aware that people donât like seeing a bunch of selfies of others, but when you ask people who hate selfies to rate their own selfies they rate them really high â almost as if theyâd forgotten what they just said.â
To conduct the study, Re and team escorted 200 undergraduate students into a room where they were each asked to take a photo of themselves that they would be happy posting online.
Then the researchers came into the room and asked each student to pose for a photo as if it was being taken by a friend who was going to post the photo on social media.
The students â who had a mean age of 22 â were asked to rate the photos of themselves on a scale of 1-7 in terms of attractiveness (1 = Not very attractive, 7 = Very attractive) and likeability (1 = Not very likable, 7 = Very likable.)
The students â who werenât told what the study was about â were also asked to fill out a narcissistic personality survey, as well as a questionnaire about their selfie-taking habits.
A separate group of nearly 200 people then rated the selfie-takersâ photos on the same 1-7 scales for attractiveness and likability.
Roughly half of the student participants reported regularly taking selfies (roughly 5 selfies in the week previous to the study, posting an average of 1.5 of those selfies in that time frame.)
The results of the study paint a picture of the generous views certain people have of themselves, compared to unbiased views that others have of how we present ourselves online.
Frequent selfie-takersâ opinion of themselves (roughly 4.5 / 7 on the attractiveness scale, on average, and 5 / 7 on the likeability scale, on average) was higher than the opinions non-selfie-takers had of themselves (roughly 3.5 / 7 on the attractiveness scale, on average, and 4 / 7 on the likeability scale, on average.)
Serial-selfiersâ opinions of themselves were even higher when compared to what other people thought of the frequent selfie-takersâ photos (other people rated the frequent selfie-takersâ images at roughly 3 / 7 on the attractiveness scale, on average, and 4 / 7 on the likeability scale, on average.)
âWe actually had a really hard time finding our group of non-selfie-takers,â Re says. âSome people reported taking as many as 20, 50, even 100 selfies in a week.â
Across-the-board, all the selfie-takers had a higher opinion of their own photos than the ones that the experimenters took of them, though the outsiders looking at the photos essentially rated the selfie-takersâ own photos and ones that the experimenters took of them equally low.
âPeople take so many of these, they trick themselves in to thinking theyâre doing a good job at it,â says Re. âIronically, by doing so, they may be making themselves look more narcissistic andless attractive.â
Re says heâs interested in doing a follow-up survey with a larger, more-diverse sample, as such insights into our online presence can have important implications for career advancement, personal relationships, and other instances where itâs important to be seen in a positive light.
Reâs study appears in the .