“But first, let me take a selfie.”
The concept of taking a self-portrait on a smart phone (or what the youngins call a “selfie”), has become such a popular trend that it’s worked it’s way into everyday life. You can’t experience culture without coming into contact with a hundred selfies. People taking them in public, posting them online, singing about them in music, and analyzing them in the news are parts of our daily life.
Selfies are also criticized by everybody because, I mean, why not? It’s really easy to call somebody out for taking a picture of him or herself and then posting it on a public platform. On the surface, it is a very vain and narcissistic thing to do. But is that why we do it?
Science tells us that we might be posting selfies because we are trying to take control of our appearance.
Think about it: throughout the day, you never see your face. Any reactions you have or faces you make are viewed by other people, but not by yourself. When you are viewing yourself, it’s usually alone, unnatural, and in front of a mirror, so you have a very faulty image of what you look like.
When was the last time you brought a mirror with you to a social setting so you could watch how you react to those around you? (While this would probably be a fascinating social experiment, people would probably find you a little bizarre.) You have no idea what you look like when somebody tells you good news, you omly know what your face feels like.
How do we view ourselves compared to other people?
University College London neuroscientist James Kilner asked this very question. For example, you know what your face feels like when you are excited, but you don’t know what it looks like. In a study, participants were shown photos of themselves making a face and then asked to make that same face again without looking in a mirror. Without a visual cue, they simply had to base their actions on what they felt was correct, rather than having the visual feedback. Often, participants could not reproduce the same face.
Likewise, participants were asked to look at photos of themselves and pick which ones represented them most accurately. Some photographs had been digitally altered to make the participants look better than they actually appeared, and like clockwork, people picked the most attractive photo of themselves as the best representation. Even though these pictures weren’t accurate, participants thought they were. we overestimate how attractive we are because we don’t have the visual cues to know for sure.
We have a very poor image of ourselves.
This study revealed that humans don’t understand themselves. We view ourselves very differently than the rest of the world does and often we don’t like what the world sees. How many times have you come across a candid of you and said, “wow that looks nothing like me.” Does it look nothing like you, or are you just significantly more attractive in your head?
The reason we post selfies seems to stem from control. We want to have control over the way people view us and we want to give a portrait to the world of ourselves that is similar to the portrait that exists in our heads. So is it narcissistic to take selfies? Yes, but it stems from the desire to figure yourself out and understand how the world views you. (Though it’s still probably a good idea to refrain from posting 12 selfies a day.)
[Featured Image Credit:melycgcg via Flickr]
Are Selfies Narcissistic? Maybe Not is an article from: LifeDaily