Who decided you should look like this?

The instinctive answer is: corporations, advertising, fashion or the media. Someone, somewhere, established a standard (slim, toned, symmetrical, young) and imposed it from above on millions of people who now feel inadequate.

It is a comforting narrative because it follows the most basic, reassuring conventions of storytelling: it has a culprit and offers a simple solution whereby, if you stop the culprit, the problem disappears.

But it might work differently. Let us postulate (because I have no certainties, only questions) that standards emerge from below, from the interaction between the way the human brain processes social comparison, the way algorithms amplify whatever generates engagement, and the way millions of people, each with their own insecurities, produce and consume content that reinforces the very standards that make them feel bad.

In this scenario, no one designed the standard: it formed by itself, which is what makes it so resistant to change.

Social comparison needs no director

In 1954, Leon Festinger formulated social comparison theory: people evaluate themselves by comparing themselves with others, and tend to compare upwards (with those they perceive as better). It is an evolutionary mechanism: comparison guides behaviour, signals one's position within the group and motivates improvement.

The problem is that this mechanism evolved in groups of a few dozen people, where you compared yourself with those who lived alongside you, in the same circumstances, subject to the same constraints. The sample was limited, representative and realistic.

An Instagram feed is something more than a village: it is an endless stream of images, selected, filtered, lit, posed and finally presented as spontaneous. The brain knows consciously, but does not fully absorb, that it is looking at an extreme selection, and applies the same comparison mechanism it used in the village. But the sample has changed: these are no longer the real people around you, but the most carefully curated versions of millions of strangers.

Research confirms this: exposure to content focused on physical appearance predicts body dissatisfaction far more than time spent on social media. Those who scroll through a generic feed report no significant effects. Those who scroll through a feed full of idealised body images do (Tiggemann and Velissaris, 2020). Comparison is triggered by the content, not the medium.

No one imposes the content: users produce it, millions of people posting the best version of themselves, triggering in those who look an upward comparison that pushes them to post an even better version of themselves. The cycle has no beginning and no director. It feeds itself and ends up having no end either.

The algorithm as amplifier, not author

This is where the element that changes the scale of the phenomenon comes in. Social media algorithms do not decide what is beautiful: that information is not decisive for their success. They decide what to show according to a single criterion: engagement. Whatever generates more reactions (likes, comments, shares, viewing time) is shown to more people; whatever generates no engagement disappears.

The most extreme images perform better: a very thin, very muscular, very symmetrical body generates more reactions than an ordinary body, not because it is “better” but because it is further from the norm and therefore more salient in terms of attention. The algorithm has no opinion on beauty: it registers that the content generates engagement and amplifies it. The result is that the feed fills with extremes, and those extremes become the new perceived normal.

This mechanism is identical in every sphere: the most alarming news story performs better than a balanced one, the most polarising opinion performs better than a nuanced one, the most extreme physique performs better than an ordinary one. The algorithm merely amplifies the bias on a global scale.

The most visually extreme content performs better and is amplified to reach larger audiences, regardless of platform or gender. For women, the standard tends towards thinness and unrealistic proportions; for men, towards extreme muscularity and the “sigma male aesthetic”: a model combining physical and attitudinal ideals, with documented overlaps with problematic online communities. For adolescents whose identities are still forming, the combination of physical and ideological messages creates compounded risks.

18 billion dollars' worth of awareness

On 27 August 2026, Meta agreed to an 18-billion-dollar settlement in the federal case accusing it of having designed Instagram and Facebook to addict minors, with documented consequences for mental health. Mark Zuckerberg testified in court, where more than 1,700 lawsuits had been consolidated into the proceedings.

Among the demands accepted: changes to algorithms described as “dopamine manipulators”, removal of filters on users' personal images, parental verification for minors' accounts, elimination of disappearing posts, and a ban on multiple accounts.
The most relevant point for our discussion is not so much the amount as what the trial documented: the platforms knew that the design of their interfaces (infinite scrolling, autoplay, intermittent notifications, beauty filters) activated dopaminergic circuits through mechanisms identical to those of gambling. They knew, and did not change the design, because the design worked: engagement was growing and revenues were growing.

This fact shifts the conversation. Toxic beauty standards may not be imposed from above in the traditional sense: no one wrote a document saying “let us make people insecure”. But the system that amplifies them was designed to maximise engagement, and insecurity generates engagement. The result is the same as an imposition from above, but the mechanism is more insidious: it is a structural incentive, not an explicit decision.

The dopamine that rewrites the standard

The circuit is dopaminergic and works exactly like that of a slot machine.
The brain does not release dopamine when you find something rewarding; it releases it when there is a possibility of finding something rewarding. The principle of variable reward, discovered by Skinner in the 1950s: uncertainty about the outcome is what sustains the behaviour. Every scroll could bring the image that inspires you, the comment that gratifies you, the like that validates you. It almost never does, but “almost never” is irrelevant to the circuit: it is the possibility that counts.

Every time you scroll through a feed and encounter an image that triggers social comparison (someone who looks more beautiful, fitter, happier than you), the brain simultaneously registers two things: inadequacy (upward comparison) and the possibility that the next scroll will offer you something better (variable reward). The two reinforce each other, and the more inadequate you feel, the more you seek compensation in scrolling. The more you scroll, the more images you encounter that fuel your inadequacy.

The beauty standard is continually rewritten, thousands of times a day, by a system that selects and amplifies the images that generate the strongest emotional response, and the strongest emotional responses are those linked to insecurity, desire and comparison.

It is no one's fault. And it is everyone's problem.

Here lies the point that makes the phenomenon so difficult to address, because if the standard were imposed from above, it would be enough to change those at the top. Regulate advertising, diversify the models on the catwalk, require the media to represent different bodies (and some of this is being done, but, as it happens, with little success on a large scale). These are all useful and necessary things that do not touch the generative mechanism, which is distributed.
The toxic beauty standard is an emergent property of the system, arising from the interaction between a brain programmed for social comparison, an algorithm programmed for engagement, and millions of users who are simultaneously victims and propagators of the same standard. Each posts their best version, each compares their real version with everyone else's best version, each raises the bar by a millimetre. No one has imposed anything, while the system has produced the result all by itself.

Donella Meadows would say that the leverage point lies neither in the elements (individual images, individual users) nor in the interconnections (the algorithm, the feed), but in the paradigms: the mental model that says your worth can be measured by your appearance, that comparison with others is a reliable indicator, that what you see on a screen is an accurate representation of reality.

Changing a paradigm is the most powerful and slowest intervention, one that cannot be achieved through legislation (however much politicians like to think otherwise, or pretend they do), nor through an 18-billion-dollar settlement. It is achieved through an understanding (slow, laborious and individual) of how the mechanism works. Which is exactly what this article has tried to offer.

References

Festinger, L. (1954). “A theory of social comparison processes.” Human Relations, 7(2), 117-140.

Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Rozenblit, L. and Keil, F. (2002). “The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth.” Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521-562.

Tiggemann, M. and Velissaris, V. G. (2020). “The effect of viewing challenging ‘reality check’ Instagram comments on women’s body image.” Body Image, 33, 257-263.

Wu, T. (2016). The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Knopf.