While we often think narcissists take a lot of selfies, is there anything to back that up? Sure, we have heard they’re full of themselves but to what extent?
Well, I recently came across an article in Psychology Today that covered a study that really seemed to set things out more clearly. Within this article, it was gone over that there are a few different kinds of selfies which many people are not aware of. There are solo selfies, group selfies, and couple selfies.
When assessing this kind of thing the researchers being referred to broke things down into two different actual studies. One of those being keeping up with the number of selfies someone admitted they had posted on social media and the other their social media selfie content being counted by someone from else. This ended up showing that women tend to post more selfies than men but what does that mean?
Well, it seems measures for things like vanity, leadership, and admiration demand helped identify who were posting the most selfies in men when it came to women things were not quite the same. Women only seemed to be predictable when it came to admiration demand. This research might not have been the most extensive with both bodies of research holding under a thousand in ‘sample sizes’ but it was and is quite interesting.
The abstract for this was listed as follows:
Although many studies have investigated individual differences in online social networking, few have examined the recent and rapidly popularized social phenomenon of the “selfie” (a self-portrait photograph of oneself). In two studies with a pooled sample of 1296 men and women, we tested the prediction that individuals who score high on four narcissism sub-scales (Self-sufficiency, Vanity, Leadership, and Admiration Demand) will be more likely to post selfies to social media sites than will individuals who exhibit low narcissism. We examined three categories of selfies: own selfies; selfies with a romantic partner; and group selfies, controlling for non-selfie photographs. Women posted more selfies of all types than did men. However, women’s selfie-posting behavior was generally unrelated to their narcissism scores. In contrast, men’s overall narcissism scores positively predicted posting own selfies, selfies with a partner, and group selfies. Moreover, men’s Vanity, Leadership, and Admiration Demand scores each independently predicted the posting of one or more types of selfies. Our findings provide the first evidence that the link between narcissism and selfie-posting behavior is comparatively weak among women than men and provide novel insight into the social motivations and functions of online social networking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)
You see, unlike men, women were overall not as linked with their selfies when it came to their narcissistic traits/tendencies. That being said, this does mean there is even if just on a small scale an mostly for men some kind of link present between narcissism and selfies overall. For more information on this please check out the video below it covers different research on the subject at hand.