Selfie - an innocent pastime or a symptom of narcissism?

According to a 2016 British study, young people devote a minimum of five hours a week exclusively to taking selfies, or self-portrait photos. Why is this such a popular phenomenon, and why do people like to spend their free time creating selfies and viewing them with others on social profiles?

To answer this question, one can use the theory of social comparison created by Leon Festinger. This is the concept that people learn about their own attitudes, abilities, preferences by comparing themselves to others, especially when objective standards are unknown. How can one judge one's beauty, leisure activities or clothing more quickly and easily than by comparing one's photos and the number of likes they have garnered to the photos and "likes" of others? One can clearly see the trap one can fall into, which is confirmed by numerous studies. When looking at the photos of others, the image of oneself unfortunately declines. Why? Because photos on the Internet are an illusion, a substitute for real life. After all, people don't share their failures, they don't brag about spending their free time lying around and getting bored, they don't upload a selfie in which they look sad or neglected. Thus, looking for references to themselves in idealized images of others can make one feel bad. Automatic thoughts arise, depreciating the self-image: "They have everything, and I have nothing," which is very often far from the truth! Paradoxically, studies show that the lower the self-image a person has, the higher the need to take a selfie. What's more, there is evidence that there is a correlation between narcissism understood as a personality trait and the number of photos taken of oneself and uploaded to portals, especially for men (Peter Gray writes more on this topic for Psychology Today in an article

Why Is Narcissism Increasing Among Young Americans?

). Therefore, one must be careful whom and what one envies and by whom one understates one's self-image. Everything is for people, provided, however, that it is used in moderation. Building a self-image on the basis of a photo gallery will not lead to anything reasonable....

Author: Martyna Wrona - Marchel, psychologist