Does Taking Selfies Make You a Narcissist?

You’ve heard about narcissism a million times, right? It is the most common way to frame selfies in news and entertainment media, but invoking it involves casting aside a lot of details about people’s lived experiences and misinterpreting a lot of research findings.

First off, the psychological disorder of narcissism entails significant impairments in personality functions, an impaired ability to recognize the feelings and needs of others and pathological personality traits like antagonism, grandiosity and attention seeking. Clearly, most selfie takers accused of narcissism do not actually exhibit these traits.

Here’s a typical process of how news stories of narcissistic selfies come about: first, a psychological study gets published. It can, at best, convincingly show that some people who have narcissistic tendencies might be more likely to excessively post selfies than those who are mentally healthy according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and standard psychological personality tests like the Big Five or the Dark Triad. The Big Five is a test meant to classify people’s basic personality dimensions across the categories of extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. The Dark Triad tests focus on the malevolent personality traces of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. These studies have been criticized for generalizing without sufficient statistical basis. In other words, the amount and diversity of people included are neither representative of the general population nor big enough to base reliable generalizations on. These studies are also criticized for equating individual rare cases of selfie misuse or sick/bad people (who just happen to take selfies) with the entire selfie culture. An analogy would be, if I claimed that spinning causes autism in kids because some kids, who are autistic, like to spin. While we have a full history of blaming bad behavior and disordered health on gods, technology and other people, we also have a long history of seeing those myths overturned. Speaking of myths—that claim that the American Psychiatric Association has deemed selfitis a genuine condition? Not true. A quick visit to their site reveals a dry, almost exasperated sounding statement: “No, selfitis is not in the DSM-5, but there are plenty of real mental disorders that need and deserve treatment.”

In the 18th century, novel reading was said to cause fever, and in the early 20th century riding bikes was believed to lead to lesbianism. Yet, here we all are reading novels and riding bikes, fever free and across sexualities. In addition, what often happens is that a reasonable enough psychological study that makes moderate claims regarding the correlation between people with narcissistic tendencies and selfie taking gets simplified and misrepresented for clickbait. Suddenly, “news” will be churned out that claim there to be “scientific proof” that selfie taking is a sign of narcissism or psychopathy, or worse yet—will lead to it.

Analyses of selfie-critical popular media texts have found that they describe selfies as indicators of toxic self-centeredness and self-obsession. The broad norms guiding those texts presume that too much self-love is psychologically, culturally and politically deviant.

This guides an inquisitive mind to ask why narcissism is a persuasive judgment in the first place. Why is narcissism invoked to criticize selfie practices? Is it invoked for everyone in the same way? Why does it have the capacity to function as a judgment we want to avoid?

Essentially, the assumption behind calling selfies narcissist is that if you take a picture of yourself, you must think you are worthy of being seen. This has, for hundreds of years, been OK for powerful, rich men who had portraits painted of themselves, absurdly large statues erected in their likeness, or everything from streets to tools to theorems named after them. Herein lies another crux of the matter: it is mostly young people, women and gay men whose selfie practices are ridiculed as narcissistic. If it is OK for some people to admire themselves and have others admire them, but others’ self-satisfaction is pathologized, a question of power and maintaining the existing power relations comes up.

The judgment that young women’s selfie practices are narcissistic could be seen as an underlying anxiety about them suddenly bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of visibility. When young girls no longer need the regulatory intervention of a powerful man with a modeling agency and another one with a professional camera, when gay guys or trans kids slip through the cracks and proudly show that they exist, the social order is shaken. The judgment of narcissism relies on the assumption that other people, social norms and institutions have the right to decide if you are worthy of looking at. To go a step further, we could even say that the consumer economy thrives on people, women in particular, not being self-satisfied. A lot of money is being made from selling us creams, clothes and gym memberships that promise to get us closer—but not quite—to worthy of being looked at.