Russia Launches a Safe-Selfie Campaign: Will It Work?

The Russian authorities have launched a “safe selfie” campaign in response to a series of deaths and serious injuries among selfie-takers who, in the pursuit of extreme selfie shots, have suffered numerous accidents such as falling off bridges, receiving self-inflicted gunshot wounds and being bitten by venomous snakes.

The Russian booklet shows all the ways NOT to take a selfie, including hanging from buildings, standing in front of moving trains or posing with wild animals or firearms. It’s understandable why people are concerned.  Will it work? Probably not. The people most likely to be impacted by this campaign are the parents of extreme selfie-takers (since most are teens and young adults) and not the selfie-takers themselves.

Selfie Safety. Source: https://mvd.ru/safety_selfie

It’s not surprising that young people take the most selfies. The young are more socially active and are, developmentally, exploring their identities and their position among their peers. And, besides, they look better. Young people, too, are known for engaging in risky activities.  This is also a developmental issue.  The prefrontal cortex in the human brain—which impacts emotional maturity, self image and judgment–is not fully developed until our mid-twenties. This inhibits a young person’s ability to evaluate risk and the long-term consequences of their actions.

Source: YouTube

Given what we know about human behavior and, in particular, teens, the warnings about hazardous selfies may make them more appealing by making them appear forbidden and highlighting the danger. Programs in the U.S. like Scared Straight and D.A.R.E found this out the hard way. They started by exposing kids to the horrors of prison and drug use, trying to ‘scare them straight’. It didn’t work. In some cases it had the opposite effect.  Now they go with a different type of education–critical thinking and empowering good decision making.

People do things for a reason, even if they are aware not of it. Behaviors such as taking extreme selfies have value to the selfie-taker, from social recognition, attention and bolstering self-image to the physical reward from adrenalin. Whether you view these as good or bad things doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the extreme self-taker is getting some kind of emotional payoff from what they are doing. Social media has amplified some of these effects, but it didn’t invent the urge teenagers have to show off to any, and all, who are watching.

The only real way to keep kids safe is to teach them to make good decisions, to show them how to say no when they need to and to be someone they can come to for help and answers. That takes conversations based on trust. Thus, if parents are scared by the prospect of their kids taking extreme selfies, having a conversation about the parents’ concerns and listening to their kids’ points of view is a good start. The key to this type of conversation is to have built some trust from an early age. The earlier parents start talking with their kids about technology (in lieu of lecturing at them), the better. Selfies won’t be the first or the last media or technology-based issue that shows up.

But the crux of the matter is that if you want behavior to change, it’s useful to show people how the ‘replacement’ behavior gives them something they care about. This is why prosocial campaigns with celebrities work. They provide a role model young people admire, and reframe a behavior so that it’s one they want to emulate. When Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga pour ice water over their heads for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, or Ellen DeGeneres says “It Gets Better,” it makes a difference.

A booklet on how not to take selfies got attention by the international press, but I doubt it will do the trick to curb the selfie high-flyers. I hope it doesn’t inadvertently make it worse. Personally, I’d love to see a campaign spearheaded by a revered celebrity or two–someone with pop culture clout who could drive home the point that such life-threatening selfie-taking is a total selfish waste, especially given the state of the world.  My imaginary celebrity campaign could offer a different way for teens to feel amazingly awesome and get lots of attention by harnessing all that energy and creativity into making things better. Why not have people devote what they put into hanging from a skyscraper toward figuring out how to solve a problem for someone else–like people who are out of work or children with no food or home–and capture that in a #selfiesolution?