What Is the Link Between Personality and Selfies?

Source: Susanne Nilsson/flickr CC license

In a period of just a few years, selfies have become a regular feature on social media, so much so that the word was recently added to Oxford’s online dictionary. For the uninitiated, selfies refer to photographs one takes of oneself in front of a mirror or while holding out one’s camera or phone at arm’s length. Despite the proliferation of selfies on social media, psychology and communications scholars are only now starting to publish research exploring this phenomenon. Earlier this year, I wrote about two papers examining narcissism and selfies, one focusing on American men, and the other focusing on two samples of Polish social media users. New analyses from the Polish samples, examining a wider range of personality traits, were recently published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.¹

The research examined three types of selfies: Solo selfies, selfies with a romantic partner; and selfies in a group. The researchers investigated how these different types of selfies were related to three personality traits:

• Self-esteem: One’s general positive or negative evaluation of oneself.
• Extraversion: The tendency to be sociable, talkative, and assertive.
• Social Exhibitionism: The desire to be noticed by others. Sample items from the Social Exhibitionism Index include “I like being the center of attention during social meetings” and “I enjoy it when other people observe me when I do something well”.²

Two studies were conducted. The first surveyed 748 Polish adults, and the second 548. In the first study, participants were asked to count the number of selfies of each type they had texted or posted on social media during the previous month. In the second study, the researchers accessed participants’ Facebook pages and counted the number of selfies each participant had posted.

Both studies showed that women tended to post more selfies than men. The results from the first study showed that for both genders, extraversion and exhibitionism were positively associated with posting all types of selfies. However, self-esteem was unrelated to selfie-posting.

The second study, focusing exclusively on Facebook, had more nuanced results. For women, greater exhibitionism was associated with posting all types of selfies, high extraversion was only associated with posting partner selfies, and there was no relationship between self-esteem and selfie activity. For men, high exhibitionism was associated with posting solo and group selfies, but not partner selfies; high extraversion was related to posting group and partner selfies; and greater self-esteem was related to posting solo and group selfies.

There are several explanations for why the results were slightly different between the two studies. It might be due to differences between social media sites, since the first study asked participants about all selfie-posting activity, while the second study focused only on Facebook. Another possibility is that participants in the first study were less reliable in counting their own selfies across many different formats or in classifying them into the three different categories. It is also likely that the researchers in the second study sometimes had difficulties determining if some photos were actually selfies, leading to less accurate results.

These new findings are thought-provoking, but they are difficult to interpret. Although the researchers did measure the overall number of non-selfie photos that were posted by the participants, it does not appear that they controlled for this in their analysis. Thus, we have no way of knowing if extraverts and exhibitionists post more selfies, or just more photos of any type. There is also a lot of evidence that personality relates to social media use, in general, with extraverts being especially active on these sites.^3,4 Thus, these results could just be due to greater Facebook use by those high in exhibitionism and extraversion. Similarly, the greater number of group selfies posted by extraverts could easily be due to the fact that extraverts spend more time socializing in groups, and thus these findings tell us more about the social activities of these participants than about anything specific to selfies. Also, it should be noted that the effects measured by the researchers only accounted for a small amount of the variation in selfie-posting, suggesting that most of the factors driving this behavior were not assessed in these studies.

As I discussed in my previous post on selfies, the categories of selfies measured by the researchers may be too general to differentiate them from other types of photos. For example, on my last vacation, selfie sticks were being sold everywhere with many people taking photos in front of various attractions. However, I barely saw anyone taking those pictures the old-fashioned way: Asking a stranger to snap their photo. Selfies of this sort (whether solo, partner, or group) may be no different than their non-selfie versions. However, photos snuggled up with one’s romantic partner or showing off a hair style might be more of an exclusively selfie phenomenon. The methods used by these researchers do not differentiate between someone who takes a lot of vacations and someone who posts selfies showing off their relationship or their latest hairstyle – Both would indicate high levels of selfie activity and would be coded the same way in these studies.

As exciting as it is to finally see research on this topic, it's possible that this is all much ado about nothing. Selfie-posting may be so ubiquitous on social media that it is not unique from other types of photo-posting or even overall high activity levels on social media. If that’s the case, then this study simply adds to the overall body of research examining personality and the frequency of social media use. What we really need is more comprehensive studies that allow us to tease apart personality effects that are driven by overall frequency of social media use, those driven by overall photo activity, and those driven specifically by selfies. Stay tuned.

Gwendolyn Seidman, Ph.D. is an associate professor of psychology at Albright College who studies relationships and cyberpsychology. Follow her on Twitter for updates about social psychology, relationships, and online behavior. Read more articles by Dr. Seidman on Close Encounters.

References

^{1 Sorokowska A., Oleszkiewicz A., Frackowiak, T., Pisanksi, K., Chmiel, A., & Sorokowski, P. (2016). Selfies and personality: Who posts self-portrait photographs? Personality and Individual Differences, 90, 119-123. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2015.10.037 0191-8869}

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^{2 Murray, H. A. (1938). Explorations in personality. Oxford, England: Oxford Univ. Press.}

^{3 Gosling, S. D., Augustine, A. A., Vazire, S., Holtzman, N., & Gaddis, S. (2011). Manifestations of personality in online social networks: Self-reported Facebook-related behaviors and observable profile information. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 14, 483-488.}

^{4 Wilson, K., Fornasier, S. & White, K. M. (2010). Psychological predictors of young adults' use of social networking sites. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 13, 173-177.}