Presenting Your Best Self(ie): The Influence of Gender on Vertical Orientation of Selfies on Tinder

Abstract

When taking a self-portrait or “selfie” to display in an online dating profile, individuals may intuitively manipulate the vertical camera angle to embody how they want to be perceived by the opposite sex. Concepts from evolutionary psychology and grounded cognition suggest that this manipulation can provide cues of physical height and impressions of power to the viewer which are qualities found to influence mate-selection. We predicted that men would orient selfies more often from below to appear taller (i.e., more powerful) than the viewer, and women, from an above perspective to appear shorter (i.e., less powerful). A content analysis was conducted which coded the vertical orientation of 557 selfies from profile pictures on the popular mobile dating application, Tinder. In general, selfies were commonly used by both men (54%) and women (90%). Consistent with our predictions, a gender difference emerged; men's selfies were angled significantly more often from below, whereas women's were angled more often from above. Our findings suggest that selfies presented in a mate-attraction context are intuitively or perhaps consciously selected to adhere to ideal mate qualities. Further discussion proposes that biological or individual differences may also facilitate vertical compositions of selfies.

Selfies as Duplex Non-verbal Communication: Human—Media Interaction, Human—Human Interaction, Case Study, and Research Manifesto

“…Females, conversely, took selfies that make viewers feel they are looking straight ahead or perhaps slightly down to an individual of the same height or shorter. Interestingly, this sex-related difference in the implied viewpoint of the selfie is consistent with the difference observed by Sedgewick et al (2017) in a sample of selfies posted on the online dating application Tinder. Sedgewick et al asked raters to categorize each selfie as suggesting a view from above or from below and found that male selfies were more often rated to suggest a view from below than females.…”

“…Interestingly, these features are related to the taker's choice of the best camera angle, distance, and elevation as suggested in Kelly's introspective report at the beginning of this section. In another recent study, Sedgewick et al (2017) tackled this issue directly using a sample of selfies from the mobile dating application Tinder. They asked six raters to code their implied vertical location as above, below, or at the same level relative to the person in the pictures.…”

“…The same search on the specialist database PubMed yields only about 60 hits, but the bulk of these papers consists of policy commentaries, historical narratives, clinical studies, and health communication applications with limited empirical content. The relatively few papers of interest for the current project may be grouped into three broad categories: studies attempting to connect selfierelated behaviors to personality and motivation (Qiu et al, 2015;Sorokowski et al, 2015;Dhir et al, 2016Dhir et al, , 2017Sorokowska et al, 2016;Sung et al, 2016;Baiocco et al, 2017;Diefenbach and Christoforakos, 2017;Etgar and Amichai-Hamburger, 2017;Karwowski and Brzeski, 2017;Krämer et al, 2017;Musil et al, 2017); studies assessing visual compositional choices for selfies, sometimes in relation to neuropsychological hypotheses (Bruno and Bertamini, 2013;Bruno et al, 2014Bruno et al, , 2015Bruno et al, , 2017Lindell, 2017a,b;Manovich et al, 2017;Schneider and Carbon, 2017;Sedgewick et al, 2017;Babic et al, 2018), and theory papers (Frosh, 2015;Senft and Baym, 2015;Eagar and Dann, 2016;Lim, 2016;Carbon, 2017;Kozinets et al, 2017;Bruno et al, 2018). While interesting, these findings and analyses remain scattered and in need of a common theoretical framework.…”

Gender Performance Discourse on Tinder Profile Pictures in London, Uk – A Social Semiotics Study

“…The analyst recommends that "muscleshowing" guys lean toward to appear off their physical highlights since they assume real quality is related with the manly persona. Besides, point choices-wise, The ponder discoveries to some degree differentiate Sedgewick et al (2017) where they found guys appearing inclinations towards lowangle photo to depict themselves as stronglooking, taller, and higher control position than that of gathering of people, and the female partner where they favored tall point for an figment of being brief, less huge, and within the lesser control position than their group of onlookers. The researchers proceeded that point choice is generally due to natural faculties at play as well as the attitude of "the perfect mate qualities".…”

“…Selfie culture on Tinder is also semiotically relevant to how people hint their gender performances. Sedgewick, Flath, & Elias (2017) finds that the males prefer to take a photo of themselves with angle that is lower while the females have an affinity towards taking a selfie with angles that are higher. These findings, the scholars argue, correspond to what the users believe as "the ideal mate qualities": for the males, lower point would make a "tall illusion" and more in control; lower point would reflect a "small/ brief illusion" for the females in this way less in control.…”