Why do we love taking selfies more?

It comes to the imagination of some at first glance that the addiction to taking selfies is a kind of narcissism, i.e. selfishness and self-love, but a recent study confirmed that this is not the case all the time.

The researchers saw that selfies may serve as a way to help capture the deeper meaning of moments. They added that “when we use photography, we take a picture of the scene from our own perspective, because we want to document an immediate experience.”

Build your own stories

While Zachary Ness, the study supervisor, who previously worked at Ohio State University, but is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen in Germany, pointed out that many people sometimes scoff at the issue of taking pictures, but personal photos have the ability to help people to reconnect with their past experiences and build their own stories,” according to the Daily Mail.

"These selfies can document the greater meaning of a moment...and it's not just an act of arrogance that might be thought," said Lisa Libby, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

As part of the study, experts conducted six experiments involving 2113 participants. In one of them, participants were asked to read a scenario in which they might want to take a picture, such as a day at the beach with a close friend, and to rate the importance and feasibility of the experiment. The researchers said the more participants rated the meaning of the event to them, the more likely they were to take a picture with themselves in it. In another experiment, the participants examined the photos they had posted on their Instagram accounts.

visual perspective

The results show that if a selfie makes its takers think about the greater meaning of the moment it was taken.

Meanwhile, the researchers found that images showing what a scene looked like from their visual perspective made them think about the physical experience of those moments.

The scientists then asked the participants again to open their most recent Instagram post showing one of their photos, and asked if they were trying to capture the larger meaning or physical experience of the moment. "We found that people didn't like their photo as much if there was a mismatch between the perspective of the photo and their purpose for taking it," Libby said. While Ness further explained that people also have very personal motives for taking photos.

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