Scrolling through Instagram after Halloweekend at UMass, it seems like every other picture I viewed was either 1) a selfie or, 2) a solo picture featuring a girl in their zombie makeup/cat ears/police uniform (the last of which I am admittedly guilty of). Seeing people promote their looks this way, however, has become so common that I don’t even notice as I throw out likes to everyone I know, thinking to myself that they all look amazing in their chosen outfit.
Reflecting on this process, however, has me wondering: does posting a picture of yourself and seeing the “likes” rack up increase levels of narcissism? Or am I only seeing people who already have a tendency towards narcissism because they naturally post more?
While not a lot of research has been done in this area, I turned to a Psychology Today article to give me guidance on this topic. According to them, narcissism is not a single personality trait, but rather a collection of several “related qualities,” which are:
- Self-sufficiency, or the belief that you don’t need other people to accomplish things
- Vanity, or excessive concern about your physical appearance and the tendency to admire yourself
- Leadership, or believing you should have authority over people
- Admiration demand, or feeling entitled to special privileges and feeling superior to others
It is very important to note that a person can possess these qualities and not be considered a narcissist; the actual personality disorder is a classifiable and diagnosable condition, and very few people who you think are “into themselves” actually have a mental disorder. In addition, not everyone who is a real narcissist even has all these qualities. Throwing around terms like that not only damages the public perception of what mental illness actually is, but it hurts those who actually suffer from it and can’t help themselves. Despite this, it’s possible to rank higher on the spectrum of narcissistic behavior than other people do, and that is exactly what one study set out to find.
The experiment, which was technically two studies combined, looked at three kinds of selfies: solo selfies, selfies with a romantic partner, and group selfies. The first study was a survey of 748 adults and asked participants to count how many selfies of each type they’d either posted online or texted in the past month. The second study involved 548 adults and involved researchers accessing participant’s Facebook pages to count how many selfies they’d actually posted (which is a less biased method than self-reporting).
Both studies set a control for how many total photos participants posted, so that the results were not influenced by potential narcissists simply posting more photos in general. Participants were also asked to complete a test measuring their levels of narcissistic behavior and thoughts. At the end, researchers found that total narcissism scores including all the subscales (except for the Self-Sufficiency trait) were positively correlated with selfie posting for men—but for women, only the Admiration Demand subscale predicted the amount of selfies posted.
All of these correlations were rather small, however, and because it was only correlational research we cannot actually pinpoint a cause. Overall, the bottom line of the study was that it is slightly easier to predict selfie behavior in men than women given only their levels of narcissism—and even then, I wouldn’t go around saying that you can accurately predict someone’s mental state given the number of pictures they post about a certain topic. When you’re scrolling through Instagram or Facebook, make sure to keep this in mind.