If you take a lot of selfies, you may belong to a very special group – but you knew that! More about Narcissism later.
What do your selfies say about you? If you take an inordinate amount of them, you might have more than healthy self-esteem, you might be – a narcissistic psychopath! Yes, that makes you special, so please do read on.
You have scientists at Ohio State University to thank for this information. They were first to correlate excessive selfie taking and psychopathy. Just trust us, they used reliable scientific methods to reach their conclusions.
In case you believe this is personal, it is not jealousy speaking. I’m at peace with my inability to do ‘duck lips’ convincingly. (see small photo please for an example of the phenomenon) Nor is it because I had not taken a photo since approximately 2001. The long lapse may well indeed account for another type of mental illness – or a fear of being compared to wanted posters, but this is about you – and your friends!
High scores on the test created by the researchers do not mean that someone is a raving psychopath, the tests are graded on a sliding scale, so one could have a little or a lot of the traits associated with the ‘Dark Triad’- or the Big Three:
Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy. One might even carry traits of all three, there is no need to declare a major in one.
While all are different, they share some delightful characteristics such as, deceitfulness, self-promotion, coldness,
disagreeableness, exploitation, aggression – and many more delightful and interesting characteristics such as a lack of empathy. Sucks to be you – er, I mean your acquaintance, hey?
You’re right. This probably doesn’t apply to you at all, but it may point to someone you know.
I found it interesting to learn that they studied men only, and found that those who didn’t take the time to carefully edit their photos before posting immediately, were not narcissists. Mind, they could still be psychopaths…But researchers didn’t take into consideration that some of those men were sending – shall I say, ‘Anthony Weiner’ pictures’ where impulse may be much more important than editing.