Motor biases do not influence posing orientation in selfies.

Abstract

When posing for portraits people tend to offer their left cheek. This bias is also evident in selfies: informal photographic self-portraits taken with a smartphone. Mechanical biases have been argued to influence selfie posing orientation (predicting that using the left hand favours a stronger left cheek bias), however this hypothesis has not been directly tested. The present study was thus designed to determine whether motor biases influence selfie pose orientation. Three hundred and twenty participants (F = 159, M = 161) were asked to pose for a selfie "as you really are," and completed a handedness measure; hand used to take the selfie and selfie pose orientation were recorded. Ordinal logistic regression confirmed that neither participant handedness nor hand used to capture the selfie predicted selfie pose orientation. Regardless of sex, handedness, or hand used, participants were more likely to present a midline (49.75%) than a left (26.53%) or right (26.72%) cheek pose. Though handedness was a strong predictor of hand used to capture the selfie (left handers favour the left, and right handers the right, hand), it did not predict posing orientation. These results confirm that selfie cheek biases are not simply a residual effect of the mechanics of taking selfies.