Until recently, selfies were seen as a mere curiosity for science, but from 2017 they began to take the phenomenon seriously. Researcher Jennifer R. Sedgewick, for example, came to Tinder. Because if there is a place where you can find selfies in full hands, he thought, it is without a doubt the most used dating app in the world. The crux of the matter for Sedgewick of the University of Saskatchewan (Canada) was discovering preferences in the composition of self-portraits. And what he found was that 50% of them are frontal. The other half are taken at an angle, but while men tend to place the camera below their face to appear taller and more powerful, women take them from above.
For his part, Lev Manovich of New York University focused on the other great store of selfies: Instagram . By analyzing images taken in six very different cities around the world – São Paulo, New York, Berlin, Moscow, Bangkok and London – he found that there is a universal tendency to place the camera on the left side of the face . What is even more interesting: the snapshots taken with that orientation have more emotional intensity. Chance? Nothing of that. Let’s remember that the right hemisphere of the brain is specialized in the expression of emotions, and, as the neural wiring is crossed, the left half of the human face turns out to be the most expressive.
You think you are more handsome than you are
In the end, no matter how much you think about it, the weird thing is that you look handsome on the screen. No one is photogenic, scientists say. Our sight does not fail us, nor does our physiognomy, but our memory, as shown at Keio University (Japan). Because the image of ourselves that we store in the brain we look much more handsome and attractive than we are in reality. With bigger eyes, even. And this optimism means that, no matter how good the photo is, it hardly exceeds our expectations.
This is all very well, but what about the consequences? Does the selfie bombardment affect us? “It’s a good question,” answers Professor Nicola Bruno, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma (Italy). And he adds—: There is a tendency to speak of the phenomenon as a supreme manifestation of narcissism and the obsession with the ego of modern society. A fake news story was even published that spoke of selfitis, which was defined as an obsessive-compulsive psychopathology that would involve taking and posting selfies at all hours ”. He refers to the fact that in 2014 the hoax ran that the American Psychiatric Association was considering including as a disorder the obsession with taking snapshots of ourselves. There were those who, following the news, took it so seriously that they even created a scale of the levels of mania based on whether a person self-portrayed three, six or more times a day .
Your own marketing campaign
“ It is not a homogeneous sociocultural phenomenon . Selfies are made for many reasons: to share them with all the Internet users in the world, for your WhatsApp family group or to see them yourself ”, clarifies the Italian neuroscientist. Putting all the self-portraits in the same bag is absurd. “The only generalization that can be made is that they impact interpersonal interactions and self-perception, and that scientists want to know how.”
Sarah Diefenbach highlights the diversity of motivations. This German psychologist from the University of Munich tells us that, after conducting a series of experiments, she has found that many times there are desires for self-promotion. “We use selfies to campaign for our best virtues, express our ideas, share an intimate moment with the rest of the world and win the sympathy of others,” he explains. With the advantage that, although sometimes self-esteem does not go well, “they increase our feeling of independence , because we no longer need anyone to take a photo. And connection, because sending our portraits to other people makes us feel closer to others ”.
You can read the full report ‘Living in the selfie era’ from issue 446 of Muy Interesante.
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