Narcissism and self-esteem: Different motivations for selfie posting behaviors

Over the past few years, social networking site usage has increased rapidly, in particular as concerns photo-sharing and self-portrait photographs (so-called selfies). In the academic literature, some studies have recently analyzed the psychological antecedents of selfie posting behavior to better understand its underlying mechanism. Generally, scholars consider the use of selfies as a means of online self-presentation. In the present research, the effects of two personality traits known to impact self-presentation (i.e. narcissism and self-esteem) are investigated, considering the mediation effects of four selfie posting motives: attention-seeking, communication, archiving, and entertainment. Results on 237 participants show that selfie posting motives, narcissism and self-esteem are differently linked to frequencies depending on the type of selfie posted online (whether own, group, or partner). Moreover, the path analysis model shows that, even if positively correlated between them, self-esteem and narcissism have different motives underlying the use of selfies. In particular, narcissistic people engage in selfie posting behaviors because of a search for the attention of others and the urge to escape from boredom. Contrariwise, these are the two motives for which people with high self-esteem do not get involved in selfie-posting behaviors.