SELFIEWHY WOMEN TAKE SELFIES FROM ABOVE AND MEN FROM BELOW

The very first selfie is believed to have been taken by Robert Corneliu, an amateur chemist and photography enthusiast from Philadelphia in 1839. Since then, people seldom used another hand to take a casual photo. But is there any pattern of significance to this ritualistic behaviour? Just remember the last time you took a selfie, or just take one now. How did you position the angle of your camera? To which side did you tilt your head? And who do you think will view the photo taken?

A study conducted by Anasthasia Makhanova, a psychology student at Florida University was the starting point for this discussion. She went through hundreds of pictures from MySpace and decided that there should be a prevailing pattern to the way we click selfies. She then explored photos from dating apps like Tinder and professional sites like LinkedIn to better understand the difference in the way we click selfies.

She found out that there is a gender difference involved- i.e. men and women prefer to take selfies differently. But, who they think will view the photo also has to be taken into account. In dating apps, where people try and poke out a suitable mate, females seem to post photos from a high angle. These photos taken from above make them look smaller, younger, and more attractive. Whereas men didn’t seem to stick to a pattern while posting selfies in these dating apps. However, on LinkedIn, a professional site, men almost always took selfies from below. These photos taken from a low angle made them look bigger and more dominant.

Anasthasia also experimented with 20 grad students of her University to test this theory, where she further realized that women only tend use this method of clicking from above when they thought that other males are gonna view the photos and men seemed to click from below only on the prospect of other men watching the photo. Anasthasia also had another question in mind; Do these techniques actually work? Does clicking selfies from below make you look more competent and from above make you look more attractive? And she found the answer to be ‘Yes’, at least for the members of the opposite sex.

Next time you click a selfie, see if your hands shift downwards or surge up.