Not All Selfies Took Alike: Distinct Selfie Motivations Are Related to Different Personality Characteristics

Abstract

Selfies have become a frequent and commonplace occurrence, though the reasons which lead people to take selfies remain unclear. This research explores what motivates selfie taking, and suggests that this is not a uniform phenomenon and varying motivations may be found among selfie takers. In addition, the connection between these distinct selfie motivations and personality characteristics, including the big five, narcissism, and self-esteem, as well as types of selfie behaviors are examined. At the first stage of the research, 117 participants filled out a questionnaire dealing with their reasons for taking selfies. An explanatory factor analysis revealed three distinct selfie motivations: self-approval, belonging, and documentation. At the second stage, 191 different participants answered both the same questionnaire, and personality traits questionnaires. A confirmatory factor analysis verified that the three selfie motivations model has a good fit. Our results suggested that each selfie motivator is differently related to personality characteristics: self-approval was negatively related to: conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness to experiences, and self-esteem, and positively correlated to frequent checking for “likes.” Belonging was related to openness to experiences. Documentation was related to agreeableness and extroversion. Unlike previous studies, none of the selfie motivating factors was found to relate to narcissism. The reasons for these differences, as well as the need to refer to selfie taking as a multidimensional phenomenon, are discussed.

Selfies as Duplex Non-verbal Communication: Human—Media Interaction, Human—Human Interaction, Case Study, and Research Manifesto

“…For instance, the frequency of selfie postings has been related to exhibitionism and extraversion (Sorokowska et al, 2016), to emotionality and extraversion (Baiocco et al, 2017), and to histrionic personality scores (Sorokowska et al, 2016). Narcissism has been related to posting frequency (Sorokowski et al, 2015;Weiser, 2015;Lee and Sung, 2016) but has been found to be unrelated to motivations for taking selfies (Etgar and Amichai-Hamburger, 2017) and to attitudes toward selfie-taking (Dutta et al, 2018). These studies are relevant to our inquiry to the extent that they assume that selfie-related behaviors may provide information about selfie-takers.…”

“…The same search on the specialist database PubMed yields only about 60 hits, but the bulk of these papers consists of policy commentaries, historical narratives, clinical studies, and health communication applications with limited empirical content. The relatively few papers of interest for the current project may be grouped into three broad categories: studies attempting to connect selfierelated behaviors to personality and motivation (Qiu et al, 2015;Sorokowski et al, 2015;Dhir et al, 2016Dhir et al, , 2017Sorokowska et al, 2016;Sung et al, 2016;Baiocco et al, 2017;Diefenbach and Christoforakos, 2017;Etgar and Amichai-Hamburger, 2017;Karwowski and Brzeski, 2017;Krämer et al, 2017;Musil et al, 2017); studies assessing visual compositional choices for selfies, sometimes in relation to neuropsychological hypotheses (Bruno and Bertamini, 2013;Bruno et al, 2014Bruno et al, , 2015Bruno et al, , 2017Lindell, 2017a,b;Manovich et al, 2017;Schneider and Carbon, 2017;Sedgewick et al, 2017;Babic et al, 2018), and theory papers (Frosh, 2015;Senft and Baym, 2015;Eagar and Dann, 2016;Lim, 2016;Carbon, 2017;Kozinets et al, 2017;Bruno et al, 2018). While interesting, these findings and analyses remain scattered and in need of a common theoretical framework.…”

Selfie Expectancies Among Adolescents: Construction and Validation of an Instrument to Assess Expectancies Toward Selfies Among Boys and Girls

“… Etgar and Amichai-Hamburger (2017) have identified three principal motivations behind selfie-taking: selfie-approval, belonging, and documentation. They also suggest that each motivation can be connected to various personality traits.…”

“Who Does Not Dare, Is a Pussy.” A Textual Analysis of Media Panics, Youth, and Sexting in Print Media

“…Most research has focused on young people's uses of social media. These studies analyzed youth's social media uses from feminist and queer theory perspectives (Attwood, 2011;De Ridder & Van Bauwel, 2013;Gill, 2007;Ringrose, 2011), but also from psychological (Cedillo & Ocampo, 2016;Etgar & Amichai-Hamburger, 2017) and youth studies perspectives (Bauermeister, 2013;Levine, 2013). Although these studies have been contributing greatly to our understanding of young people's social media uses and sexuality, there is need for understanding the broader cultural discourses in print media's representations of youth, sexuality and social media.…”