The new technological enhancements and the accessibility to varieties of online applications, enable
users to collect personal data and perform self-evaluation through test, comparison and
experimentation. The sparked interest in numbers and numbers as self-representative visualisations is
prominent in social networking sites, which are the empirical setting for the present study. This paper
sets out to establish a multi-theoretical framework which enables the investigation of emerging
phenomena of the role of numbers in social networking sites. The proposed framework rests on three
theoretical pillars: self-determination theory, heuristic decision making and behavioural economics. A
discussion departs from these convictions to investigate user reactions and behaviour when faced with
numerical representations in the SNS.