People who regularly take selfies 'overestimate their own attractiveness'

Posting a super-groomed selfie online could have the opposite effect to that intended, according to new research which found that selfie fans regularly overestimate their own attractiveness.

The study found that people who enjoy taking pictures of themselves rated themselves as more attractive than other people looking at their photos.

Observers also found selfie-takers less likeable as they appeared narcissistic, according to the researchers at the University of Toronto.

The study recruited 198 undergraduate students who were asked to take both a 'selfie' image of themselves and also a photo of another person.

They were then whether they took selfies regularly, and were told to rate photos of themselves and others for both attractiveness and perceived 'likableness'.

Researchers found that selfie fans gave themselves a higher attractiveness score for their self-portraits than outside observers.

The authors suggested that the result showed a tendency for "self-favouring bias" - and suggested that social media could inflate the effect.

"Given that Facebook—the world’s largest photo-based social networking site—allows users to ‘‘like’’ particular photos but not to ‘‘dislike’’ them, people could come to overestimate others’ favorable opinions of their selfiesbecause the feedback they receive is uniformly positive," they wrote.

"The absence of a mechanism for negative responses may therefore hinder such feedback, skewing individuals’ self-perceptions to become more positive."