We all have that one person on our Facebook/Twitter/Instagram feed that consistently and relentlessly posts selfies, and you probably dislike them a little bit for it. In fairness, you may be right to...
A team at Ohio State University asked 800 men between the ages of 18-40 to complete two different surveys; one about how many pictures they posted on social media and one that looked at their personality traits. The results showed that those who posted selfies more often had higher traits of narcissism (hardly surprising) and psychopathic tendencies.
Professor Jesse Fox, the lead author of the study, said that the interesting part of the results was that the men in the study who posted a lot of selfies had higher rates of self-objectification, meaning that they based a value of their own worth primarily on their appearance. He said:
We know that self-objectification leads to a lot of terrible things, like depression and eating disorders in women. With the growing use of social networks, everyone is more concerned with their appearance. That means self-objectification may become a bigger problem for men, as well as for women.
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The research was later published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
However, there's no need to lay down that selfie stick you bought yourself as a Christmas presents just yet; while the selfie-loving men did display higher than average rates for psychopathic tendencies, they do all still fall within the range of normal human behaviour.
