Must Read: People Can Analyze You By Your Selfies! Find Out More Here!

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A recent study by a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Sarah Diefenbach, created an online survey to examine people's motives and judgments for taking and viewing selfies. Selfies are very popular on the social media and Google statistics have estimated that about 93 million selfies were taken every day in 2014.

However, this estimation is based on only those taken on Android devices with selfie accessories like selfie sticks, selfie cameras on phones now commonplace, and the word "selfie" was even added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013. Although selfies are extremely common, opinions on differ substantially as some people described them as a creative outlet and a way to connect with other people.

But others regard them as narcissistic, self-promotional and inauthentic, according to Science Daily. Selfie critics argue that the nature of the selfie, which is a shot taken deliberately of oneself by oneself, invariably means that they can never be an authentic glimpse into a person's life. Instead, they believe it appears contrived, making the taker look self-absorbed.

Selfies, as a contemporary cultural phenomenon, are of great interest to psychologists with regards to how people feel and think when taking, posting and viewing their own selfies and those of other people. In the study, a total of 238 people in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland completed the survey and the researchers discovered that 77 percent of the study participants often took selfies.

"One reason for this might be their fit with widespread self-presentation strategies such as self-promotion and self-disclosure. The selfie as a self-advertisement, plying the audience with one's positive characteristics or the selfie as an act of self-disclosure, sharing a private moment with the rest of the world and hopefully earning sympathy, appear to be key motivators," Diefenbach explains.

A third form of self-presentation is classified as understatement where people portray themselves, their achievements and their abilities as unimportant. The participants of the study who scored high on self-promotion or self-disclosure are said to be more likely to be positive about taking selfies when compared to those that scored highly on understatement.

However, it is amazing that despite the fact that 77 percent of the study participants regularly take selfies, up to 67 percent admitted the potential negative impacts of selfies, including influence on a person's self-esteem. This negative consequence of selfies was also displayed by 82 percent of the study participants who noted that they preferred to view other types of photos rather than selfies on social media, according to Eurekalert.

The researchers believe that judging by these attitudes, selfies should not be as popular as they currently are. They have termed this phenomenon where lots people often take selfies but most people do not seem to like them as "selfie paradox." The key to the paradox could be in the way the study participants view their own selfies, compared to the selfies of others.

The study participants attributed more self-presentational motives and less authenticity to selfies taken by others, but not to those taken by themselves, which was judged as self-ironic and more authentic. Diefenbach noted that could be the perfect explanation of how everybody takes selfies without feeling narcissistic. She added that she wonder how the world is full of selfies if most people think like this. The findings were published in Frontiers in Psychology.