Study reveals a connection between selfies and people's personalities
Selfies are a major part of our lives today. However, did you know that clicking selfies can say a lot about your personality as well? Researchers from the University of Bamberg, Germany asked a bunch of people to identify the selfie nature of some random photographs. Based on these perceptions, the researchers concluded the semantics of selfies.
About the study
The researchers asked participants to explain their initial thoughts about a sample of selfies to learn more about the meanings that people attach to various photos. These correlations were then combined to determine how viewers interpret various kinds of selfies. According to senior author and Professor Claus-Christian Carbon, the study used "personal reports and associations" to describe and categorize selfies systematically.
Used self-portraits without text
The scientists only included text-free self-portraits that were taken using a mobile device's camera using the subjects' hands or a selfie stick. The final 1,001 selfies were displayed with a simple gray backdrop and at standard size. The researchers used the internet to find 132 volunteers. They employed an algorithm to choose 15 randomly chosen selfies for each participant to evaluate the photographs.
How they concluded
For each selfie, the participants were given five text boxes to record their impromptu responses. The researchers analyzed the data to group the respondents' first perceptions into 26 categories, including "mood," "objects," "pose," and "alcohol." After analyzing the frequency and co-occurrence of these categories in the responses, the scientists clustered the data into five distinct "semantic profiles."
What researchers identified
The five distinct category clusters or "semantic profiles" that were found by the authors included aesthetics, imagination, trait, state, and theory of mind. "Aesthetics," the largest category, consisted of images showcasing style or aesthetic experience. Following this closely were two categories of images: "imagination," which prompted respondents to imagine the location/activity of the selfie-taker, and "trait," which included pictures that evoked personality-related terms.
More research is needed
"We were quite impressed how often the category 'theory of mind' was expressed, because this is a very sophisticated way of communicating inner feelings and thoughts," Tobias Schneider, lead author of the study stated. Moreover, the researchers noted that additional research is necessary because these semantic traits might not be conveyed or comprehended in the same way globally.
