Over half of all Americans who take selfies dislike them, says survey

Americans have a love-hate relationship with selfies.

A new survey from the research company YouGov shows that over 63 percent of Americans say they take selfies. But that doesn’t mean America is all aboard the selfie train. 

While most Americans may take selfies, the majority of selfie-takers also associate at least one negative trait like “annoying” or “narcissistic” with the ubiquitous photos, according to the survey. 

Sheesh, what’s with all the self-loathing, America? We really need to spend more time looking into the mirror on that one!

But the discrepancy between how people feel about selfies, and the fact that people still take selfies, might not have much to do with self-loathing, and everything to do with a blind spot we only reserve for ourselves. 

Selfies are ubiquitous and therefore both parts coveted and stressful, which might account for people’s conflicted feelings about them. We also may judge others for taking selfies, and find other peoples’ self-centered photo habits annoying. But when we ourselves take selfies, we can explain — and therefore justify — our behavior, so that we don’t think of it as narcissistic.

“We’re easier on ourselves than we are on other people,” Jesse Fox, an Ohio State communications professor who has studied the relationship between selfies and narcissism, said. 

To understand people’s relationship with selfies, YouGov used its “nationally representative” Omnibus panel of 2 million Americans. Overall, it found that Americans’ relationship with selfies are… complicated.

Nearly two thirds of Americans (63 percent) say they take selfies. 14 percent snap selfies “somewhat often” and 8 percent copped to taking the photos “very often.”

But we apparently feel ambivalent at best about our selfie habit. When asked for clarification about how people’s perceptions of selfies correlated with how many people take selfies, YouGov told Mashable that 52 percent of selfie takers selected at least one negative description. Among those who take selfies somewhat or very often, 35 percent associate the pics with a negative trait. 

Survey respondents could pick more than one trait, and sometimes they did pick both negative and positive traits. Here’s a breakdown:

One explanation for this apparently conflicted attitude is that selfies are just so ubiquitous at this point, that people feel like they have to take them — whether they want to or not.

“Everyone’s different, but some patients obsess over what they look like on their phones,” Dr. Boris Paskhover says. “People care about how the world perceives them. And Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook are how the world sees you now.”

Dr. Pashkover is an assistant professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School’s Department of Otolaryngology who specializes in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery. He has published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA): Facial Plastic Surgery about how selfies were impacting the way his patients saw themselves, and what procedures they were asking for.

Dr. Pashkover said his patients seem to have a love-hate relationship with selfies: the photos can make them feel bad about themselves, but they’re also a source of pleasure

“They love selfies,” Dr. Pashkover said. “No matter how many times you tell them it’s distorted, people still love them.”

Dr. Fox has a different take. She thinks that people can both take selfies, and hold negative opinions about them, because of a little thing called “self-serving bias.” 

“Generally, people have a self-serving bias,” Dr. Fox said. “That’s one of the reasons we may do a behavior, and we’ll excuse our own behavior, but hold it against someone else.”

Self-serving bias works like this: if we see a selfie in our news feeds taken by an acquaintance, we might think that it’s narcissistic. 

“Any time people tend to draw attention to themselves, in a lot of cultures that’s perceived negatively,” Dr. Fox said. “If you’re talking about yourself all the time, people think that’s narcissistic.”

So selfies should be inherently narcissistic, right? Not when they’re our own selfies. 

When we ourselves take selfies, we know the circumstances of the photo. Dr. Fox said that the ability to contextualize and understand why someone does something is crucial to not judging and accepting it. So, because we always know the justifications behind a selfie we ourselves take, but almost never know the reasoning of someone else, we view our own behavior as more justifiable than others. In other words, Dr. Fox thinks that people tend to levy the anti-selfie judgment on others, but are forgiving and understanding of our own selfie habits. 

Guess we need to spend a little more time reflecting, after all.