Selfies / en Drop that selfie stick: you may be vainer than you think! /news/drop-selfie-stick-you-may-be-vainer-you-think <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Drop that selfie stick: you may be vainer than you think!</span> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>lavende4</span></span> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2016-05-31T12:35:45-04:00" title="Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - 12:35" class="datetime">Tue, 05/31/2016 - 12:35</time> </span> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-cutline-long field--type-text-long field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Cutline</div> <div class="field__item">Selfie time: Nicholas Rule, associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Social Perception and Cognition at ÇŃ×ÓÖ±˛Ą with postdoctoral researcher, Daniel Re (Photo by Diana Tyszko)</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-author-reporters field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/authors-reporters/peter-mcmahon" hreflang="en">Peter McMahon</a></div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-author-legacy field--type-string field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Author legacy</div> <div class="field__item">Peter McMahon</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-topic field--type-entity-reference field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Topic</div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/topics/breaking-research" hreflang="en">Breaking Research</a></div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-story-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/research" hreflang="en">Research</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/selfies" hreflang="en">Selfies</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/faculty-arts-science" hreflang="en">Faculty of Arts &amp; Science</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/psychology" hreflang="en">Psychology</a></div> </div> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>When University of Toronto psychologist&nbsp;<strong>Daniel Re</strong>&nbsp;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.</p> <p>“It was actually a lot of fun,” says the postdoctoral researcher, who collaborated&nbsp; with his undergraduate students on the study, titled “Selfie Indulgence: Self-Favoring Biases in Perceptions of Selfies”.</p> <p>“This was definitely more lighthearted than the things we usually observe,” he adds of the study, which found that “frequent-selfie-takers” rated their own selfies higher than other people’s opinion of those same selfies.</p> <p>In-fact, according to the study, even selfie-takers who claimed they disliked the narcissism they associated with other people’s selfies still rated their own selfies higher than anyone else rated them.</p> <p>“That was a real surprise,” Re says. “They seem to be aware that people don’t like seeing a bunch of selfies of others, but when you ask people who hate selfies to rate their&nbsp;own&nbsp;selfies they rate them really high&nbsp;–&nbsp;almost as if they’d forgotten what they just said.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>The students&nbsp;–&nbsp;who had a mean age of 22&nbsp;–&nbsp;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.)</p> <p>The students&nbsp;–&nbsp;who weren’t told what the study was about&nbsp;–&nbsp;were also asked to fill out a narcissistic personality survey, as well as a questionnaire about their selfie-taking habits.</p> <p>A separate group of nearly 200 people then rated the selfie-takers’ photos on the same 1-7 scales for attractiveness and likability.</p> <p>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.)</p> <p>&nbsp;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.</p> <p>Frequent selfie-takers’ 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.)</p> <p>Serial-selfiers’ opinions of themselves were even higher when compared to what other people thought of the frequent selfie-takers’ photos (other people rated the frequent selfie-takers’ images at roughly 3 / 7 on the attractiveness scale, on average, and 4 / 7 on the likeability scale, on average.)</p> <p>“We actually had a really hard time finding our group of non-selfie-takers,” Re says. “Some people reported taking as many as 20, 50, even 100 selfies in a week.”</p> <p>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-takers’ own photos and ones that the experimenters took of them equally low.</p> <p>“People take so many of these, they trick themselves in to thinking they’re doing a good job at it,” says Re. “Ironically, by doing so, they may be making themselves look&nbsp;more&nbsp;narcissistic andless&nbsp;attractive.”</p> <p>Re says he’s 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 it’s important to be seen in a positive light.</p> <p>Re’s study appears in the <a href="http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/04/27/1948550616644299.abstract">May 18 edition of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science</a>.</p> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-news-home-page-banner field--type-boolean field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">News home page banner</div> <div class="field__item">Off</div> </div> Tue, 31 May 2016 16:35:45 +0000 lavende4 14192 at