Why do many people tilt left when taking selfies?

Take a look at people’s selfies and you’ll notice that most of them are left leaning. Science calls this the pseudoneglect bias.

Researchers from University College London, University of Parma and University of Liverpool conducted a social study, analyzing about 3,556 social media selfies. They observed that when taking selfies, people tended to focus on their eyes, especially on the left side.

Why do many people tilt left when taking selfies?
Some celebrities like Drake, Kim Kardashian and Miley Cyrus also tend to lean left when taking photos – (Image: whatsnew2day.com).

This reflects a psychosocial phenomenon called pseudoneglect , that is, spatial attention tends to be unconsciously shifted to the left.

Research also shows a link between behavior and mood. Our eyes provide information about what we are paying attention to and the left is the best way to inform people about that mood.

Not only when taking pictures, when parting the bangs, we also tend to part the hair only on the left side of the head. This phenomenon is similar to when artists apply the principle of focusing on the eyes in portraits.

This study used a selfie database of public photos uploaded to Instagram from Thailand, Germany, UK, Russia, USA, Brazil. The research photos were naturally selected.

Out of a total of 3,556 selfies, 1,931 (54%) had the left eye in the center; 1,625 (46%) have the right eye in the center. Although the difference is small, the researchers say it is remarkable.

Professor of Optics and Visual Sciences, Christopher Tyler, University of London, says that the main result of this study is to confirm the repeatability of the pseudoneglect tendency – previously common in the way painters paint portraits and now. it repeats in selfies.

According to a study published in the journal Psychology in 2014, our tendency to pay more attention to the left side of space is most evident when we perform the very simple task of bisecting a horizontal line. Most of us can’t split the middle point or deviate to the right, but often skewed to the left.

The pseudoneglect phenomenon is similar to that of patients with right hemisphere impairment who often pay less attention to the left side of the space. They are more likely to hit objects on the left side of the road than on the right.