At the origin of this hashtag is a research project that a team of researchers from LSU (including myself), University of Delaware, University of Toronto, and University of California, Berkeley are currently crowd-funding at Experiment. The idea is not so much related to selfies as to portraits or self-portraits of scientists and how these may change viewers' perceptions of scientists when shared with captions telling scientists' stories on Instagram. Our team is planning a series of lab-based and survey experiments to test whether Instagram posts created in the lab or field, and featuring the faces of science, can change public perceptions of how warm and competent scientists are. (Scientists are classically perceived as very competent but only moderately warm. On the other hand, women are generally perceived as more warm than they are competent, or in some cases are perceived low on both scales when evaluated based on their physical attractiveness.)

To explore how pictures of scientists on Instagram can shape public perceptions or guide whether stereotypes are associated with particular individuals, we will also be manipulating the gender of faces in experiment images of scientists on Instagram and accounting for characteristics such as their perceived age, ethnicity and physical attractiveness. As others have pointed out, we may also need to account for elements such as field of science portrayed in these images, clothing the scientists are wearing, whether the images obviously appear to be self-portraits or not, etc. You can read more about our research methods here.