The selfie has a bad reputation. Chances are you've heard selfies described as mental health ruining and confidence destroying. Or maybe you've read that posting selfies means you may be a narcissist. Based on this information, you would think that everyone should forego their front-facing cameras and uninstall Instagram.
But, it's never just that simple; other headlines boast that taking selfies makes you happier and acts as a confidence booster. So, which is it? How do selfies relate to how you feel about yourself, and most importantly, are they responsible for how you feel about yourself, or the other way around? These are the questions my colleague and I set out to investigate in a recent paper in which we synthesized the findings from 55 studies on selfie behaviors.
Our overarching goal was to clarify findings from the very diverse body of selfie-related research. We aimed to find out how specific selfie behaviors like taking, editing, and posting are related to how people feel about themselves. We also wanted to know how these behaviors relate to self-esteem generally, as well as to how people think about their appearance. And, we wanted to know how choices made by researchers when designing studies impact the findings. We also wanted to investigate if selfie behaviors more strongly relate to self-evaluations among women and young people, who are the most likely to use photo-based social media platforms.
We worked hard to find every study that investigated the relationship between selfies and self-evaluations. Altogether we found 55 studies.
Our results highlight the complexity of studying these topics and offer some insight as to why the headlines seem to regularly contradict each other. First, we found that selfie taking, selfie editing, and selfie posting all relate to self-evaluations differently. Selfie editing is related to holding negative self-evaluations, whereas selfie taking and posting are related to feeling good about yourself. When we looked into it further, we found that people who edit selfies don't just feel bad about how they look, they also feel bad about themselves overall. Taking and posting, on the other hand, exclusively related to people feeling good about their appearance. So far, the results suggest that taking and posting selfies might not be so bad, but editing is. But there's one big question to answer.
Chicken or Egg?
About three-quarters of the studies were correlational. In most cases these studies ask individuals to report how frequently they take, or edit, or post selfies, in addition to completing a measure of self-esteem or body satisfaction. What these studies tell us is how people who typically take, edit, or post selfies feel about themselves. What they don't tell us is whether taking, or editing, or posting a selfie changes how a person feels. When we considered the methodology of the studies, our interpretation of these findings became more nuanced. People who generally feel good about themselves are more likely to take selfies, but when researchers randomly assign people—who naturally differ in levels of self-esteem—to take selfies in a controlled experiment, it causes negative self-evaluations. So, while taking selfies more often may mean you feel good about yourself, if a group of random people is directed to take a selfie, chances are it will disrupt their self-esteem.
This discrepancy in study design did not, however, emerge for selfie editing: across the board, selfie editing seems to be harmful. People who tend to feel negative about themselves are more likely to edit their selfies, and selfie editing directly causes negative self-evaluations. These negative feelings aren't just reserved for someone's appearance—selfie editing causes people to feel worse about themselves overall, which over time could have serious consequences for mental health. Contrary to our expectations, these results did not differ based on age or gender.
While our research helps to disentangle findings from selfie research, it also offers an understanding of why we see these seemingly contradictory results. How we ask these questions, as well as how we go about answering them as researchers, can vastly impact the results we see.
For Further Reading
Felig, R. N., & Goldenberg, J. L. (2023). Selfie-evaluation: A meta-analysis of the relationship between selfie behaviors and self-evaluations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.usf.edu/10.1177/01461672231158252
Roxanne Felig is a doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida studying factors that impact women's sense of self with a focus on the role of social media in these processes.
Emotional Manipulation in the Workplace: The Machiavellian Playbook
Too Much Screen Time or Too Much Guilt?
