Self-Enhancement and Self-Verification Motives for Self-Esteem Using Facebook
For this assignment, you will choose one or two social media platform(s) (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Ticktock, etc.). Once you have chosen, in 500-750 words, do the following:
Describe the self-enhancement and self-verification motives for self-esteem.
Evaluate the posts/pages you see through the lens of self-presentation.
Discuss which motive (self-enhancement or self-verification) is most evident in the sites you viewed. Provide examples, but do not include identifying information (names, handles, gender, etc.).
Discuss if you think these online portraits of people are accurate. Explain your position.
Explain if the prevalence of being exposed to social factors on social media influences individual behavior and the development of the social self, include how it does or does not. Use social psychological terminology to explain your answer.
Discuss the positive and negative aspects associated with social media sites.
Use two to three scholarly resources to support your explanations.
Social Self
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Social Self
The social media platform that I chose is Facebook. In particular, self-enhancement entails the tendency of a person to take all the positive qualities or credit for one’s successes. In addition, self-verification depicts that individuals prefer others to perceive them in the same way they see themselves, regardless of whether their self-views are positive or negative. On that note, self-verification and self-enhancement play significant roles in facilitating self-esteem. Self-esteem refers to how people perceive themselves. For instance, many Facebook users post things that boost their self-esteem, including their success stories.
Self-presentation refers to actions or behaviors intended to change or influence the way individuals perceive someone. Some of the webpages on Facebook that fall via the lens of self-presentation are Physical Fitness, Vegetarian and Vegan Meal Inspirations, and New Luxury Cars. In most cases, people join these groups or follow these webpages to show others that they care about their health or are passionate about specific things. As such, they represent themselves in ways that they want others to perceive them.
In my opinion, self-verification is the primary motive that is evident in the webpages discussed above. Social media allows individuals to control how they want to appear or presented to their audience. In that light, a social media user tends to choose an ideal self-image (Zheng et al., 2020). For example, people scrutinize and select the webpages to follow or groups to join on Facebook since they want to be presented in a certain way. Those who want to appear as if