People Like Taking Selfies But Not Seeing Them Online: Study

PHILADELPHIA (CBS)—A new study reveals that people love taking selfies, but they don't necessarily like seeing them online.

In a recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology, Sarah Diefenbach, a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, polled 238 people living in Austria, Germany and Switzerland about taking selfies.

According to the study, 77 percent of the participants said they regularly took selfies.

"One reason for this might be their fit with widespread self-presentation strategies such as self-promotion and self-disclosure," says Diefenbach in a news release. "The selfie as a self-advertisement, plying the audience with one's positive characteristics or the selfie as an act of self-disclosure, sharing a private moment with the rest of the world and hopefully earning sympathy, appear to be key motivators," she explains.

But viewing the selfies online was a different story.

Of the 238 people polled, 82 percent of participants said that they would rather see other types of photos instead of selfies on social media.

Researchers say this phenomenon is known as the "selfie paradox."

Selfie takers tend to rationalize their own reasons for posting selfies and consider them authentic, but when viewing others, it's considered coming from an inauthentic and self-involved place.

"This may explain how everybody can take selfies without feeling narcissistic. If most people think like this, then it is no wonder that the world is full of selfies," Diefenbach explains.