Selfies are wrong; and also not right

Life is a performance, as William Shakespeare observed. “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players,” he wrote in As You Like It.

This may be so; but I, for one, do not like it. 

Not when the stage is my social media feed, and all the men and women are bringing main character energy in the form of preening, pouty, performative selfies.

Not so long ago, the most conspicuous negatives associated with photos were the transparent plastic strips stuffed into the back of Kodak envelopes behind one’s holiday snaps. Today, selfies are a plague on my house, to mix my Shakespeare plays. 

And I’m not alone in my aversion to these confected, iPhoney versions of ourselves. 

A study comparing selfies with pictures of the same people taken by someone else, found selfies were rated significantly more negatively. When the subjects were stars of their own selfie, they were viewed as less trustworthy, less socially attractive, less open to new experiences, more narcissistic, and no more physically attractive.

“… observers are indeed suspicious when they sense that people are presenting themselves by means of a self-taken picture—even when the pose with which they present themselves is identical,” the researchers said.

But while we may be painfully aware that selfies are wrong, deep down, we also know that they are not right.

Turning The Left Cheek

This is not tautology. Because it turns out that selfies are more likely to be left than right. In other words, they are more likely to show the left side of the subject’s face than the right. This has been confirmed across different cultures, for example in a large database of images taken in São Paulo, New York City, Berlin, Moscow, Bangkok and London.

It makes sense, because the left side of our face is more emotionally expressive, being more uninhibited and moving more and earlier than the right side. Hence, we perceive left faces as conveying emotions more intensely than faces’ right sides. 

For example, portraits showing the sitter’s left cheek appear happier than their hapless, right-cheeked equivalents. Faces made of two left sides, one the mirror image of the other, seem more emotionally articulate than right-right composites. And when images are mirror-reversed digitally, to make the left side of subjects’ faces look like they are on the right, the original left cheek poses, now right, are still judged as having greater emotional eloquence.

This quirk in our emotional repertoire is believed to be due to the way we’re wired.

The muscles that make expressions in the face’s lower two-thirds are controlled by the opposite side of the brain. And our brain’s right side is more dominant emotionally than the left. Hence, the left side of the face is mostly controlled by the brain’s more emotionally adroit, right side.

While this emotional asymmetry is literally staring us in the face, we’re not consciously aware of it. Yet our behaviour implies that we intuitively understand it; our preference for showing the left cheek profoundly influencing how we face up to the world.

If life is a performance, we’re hardwired to play its most emotionally charged moments facing stage right, with the left side of our face to the audience.

That’s especially when there’s cash at stake. A study of the top 20 single-user Instagram accounts looked at how subjects’ poses affected engagement, with those showing the left cheek garnering greater than 10% more likes than right cheek images. 

“These data indicate that a seemingly inconsequential turn of the head profoundly impacts audience engagement: left cheek poses gained >330,000 more “likes”, offering clear implications for marketers and others in the social media economy,” the researchers said.

And it seems that advertisers on social media do understand the added value inherent in putting one’s left face forward, at least subconsciously. Of 2,000 paid promotions on Instagram, there was a clear preference for images showing the model’s left cheek (60%).

Celebrity chefs also know that engaging the left side of their face is a recipe for success. Among 493 of their cookbook covers, 40% featured an image showing the culinary star’s left cheek, versus 32% for the right cheek, with the remainder being midline shots. 

This innate appreciation that left is more right, when showing emotions, is also seen in other groups, such as psychologists wanting to attract clients online; Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition winners receiving their medals, and mothers holding their babies.

The performances of our lives feature few more emotionally charged scenes than a mother lovingly cradling her newborn baby. Most women (60-90%) hold babies so the infant’s head is on their left side. That way, their little bundle of joy gets a better view of their more expressive left face (and is also closer to the maternal heartbeat).

This tendency to cradle to the left isn’t dependent on having a living baby to cuddle. When mothers are asked to cradle life-like dolls, they are more likely to do so on their left. That’s also the case with childless women, and children. Even when women are asked to imagine holding a child, their preference is for left-sided cradling. 

While this is human nature, it has also been observed in nature.

Among 52 mother-infant pairs of apes; chimpanzees and gorillas were highly likely to cradle on the left side. Gibbons had a preference for the left that wasn’t statistically significant. While orangutans, oddballs that they are, had individual preferences, but no favourite side overall.

Moving from nativity back to vanity, old-school portrait painters also exploited our affinity for emotional left sides.

A study of 1474 portraits produced in Western Europe from the 16^th-20^th centuries found that 68% of the female subjects and 56% of the males had more of the left side of their face visible than the right.

The enigmatic expression of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is more left than right. Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring wears the jewel in her left ear. The old woman sitting in a chair in James Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (also known as Whistler’s Mother) is seen in profile from the left.

Interestingly, a study of self-portraits found they were more likely to show more of the right side of the artist’s face. But, rather than refuting research showing a left-sided preference in other portraits, the self-portrait data supported it. Self-portraits were traditionally painted using a mirror, the researchers said. Hence, artists wanting to show their left cheek in a self-portrait would turn that side to the mirror, producing an image that looked as if it was showing their right cheek.

However, some portrait collections do not follow this trend. For example, pictures of members of the UK’s prestigious Royal Society show no bias, left or right. 

Perhaps this is because the sitters—eminent scientists, painted for professional purposes—weren’t trying to express emotion?

Researchers tested this theory out. They asked a group of young people to imagine they were posing for either a family portrait or one for the Royal Society.

“You are a warm-hearted and affectionate person. You love your family and want the portrait to remind your family of how much you love them,” the brief for the family portrait pose said.

“To achieve this, you put as much real emotion and passion into the portrait as you can.”

In contrast, the Royal Society brief was: “You are a successful scientist at the pinnacle of your career. When you pose for your portrait, you want to give the impression of an intelligent, clear-thinking person but don’t want to look at all smug or proud. To avoid this, you try very hard to avoid depicting any emotion at all.”

Sure enough, there was a significant relationship between the subjects’ imaginings and the side of their face that they presented for the camera. An emotional context produced left-sided portraits in 58% of women and 64% of men. Whereas stolidity led to left-sided images in 43% of both men and women.

“Laterality of expression in portraiture … provides a helpful hint for scientists dealing with the visual media—if you want to break the stereotype of the cold, unfeeling scientist, give them your best (left) side,” the researchers recommended.

So selfies may indeed be more right than left, if they are of unemotional, impassive scientists. Though, as far as I’m concerned, they’d still be wrong.

Adam Taor is the author of Bodypedia. A Brief Compendium of Human Anatomical Curiosities, published by Princeton University Press.