Social media brought with it a colourful circus of private details splattered across public platforms, live updates from people’e day-to-day mundane existence, and of course, the selfie parade.
Say hello to external beauty, the new ruling commodity of the virtual space.
A recent study suggests that those who are obsessed with clicking selfies are actually less attractive than they believe themselves to be, reports The Independent.
The study, which was published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, included 198 students. A total of 100 participants admitted to being selfie-lovers, while the remaining 98 claimed they barely took any.
The participants were asked to click a selfie followed by a picture taken by a third party. The pictures were then rated as viewers were asked about how attractive, likeable, as well as narcissistic, every participant looked.
The ratings revealed that both regular selfie-takers and those who hardly took selfies thought they looked better in their own photos than in those clicked by others. Additionally, the former also rated themselves much higher.
On the other hand, the viewers who looked at both sets of pictures, selfies and non-selfies, said the pictures clicked by third parties were better than the selfies.
This could perhaps also hint at an internalised aversion towards selfies as a concept now flooding every possible social media platform.
The research concluded that selfies suggest a ‘self-favouring’ bias. After clicking a handful of selfies, people often tend to prefer specific expressions and angles for their faces (eg: duck-face, squinted eyes, pouts). And if social media gives any kind of validation to these pictures... voila!
All of these elements add to people’s overestimation of their own attractiveness, which only continues to increase over time.
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