Regular selfie-takers overestimate their attractiveness: study

Toronto: Selfie lovers, take note! People who love clicking pictures of themselves regularly tend to overestimate how good looking and likable they are, a new study has found.

Researchers led by Daniel Re from University of Toronto in Canada conducted the study on 198 college students, 100 of whom were regular selfie takers.

All participants were asked to take a selfie using a smartphone camera and also had a picture taken by another person.

They then had to rate each photo on the basis of how attractive and likable they thought their friends would think they were in the picture if it were uploaded to social media.

The pictures were also rated by 178 members of the public, who determined how attractive, likable and narcissistic they thought the people in the photos were likely to be, 'The Telegraph' reported.

Researchers found that both the regular selfie-takers and the non-selfie-takers thought they would be seen as more attractive and more likeable in their photos than they were actually seen by the independent raters.

They also found that the selfie-takers overestimated themselves much more - and tended to think they looked better in the selfies than in the photos taken by other people.

"Selfie-takers generally over perceived the positive attributes purveyed by their selfies," researchers said.

Regular selfie-takers were also judged by the external raters as looking "significantly more narcissistic" than the non-selfie-takers.

"Self-enhancing misnomers may support selfie-takers' positive evaluations of their selfies, revealing notable biases in self-perception," said researchers.

The findings were published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.