Evidence that Social Comparison with the Thin Ideal Affects Implicit Self-Evaluation

Research on body image suggests that social comparison with the thin ideal has a number of negative consequences for women. To date, however, little is known on how social comparison with the thin ideal affects the accessibility of positive thoughts and feelings about the self (implicit self-liking). To examine this issue, one hundred and twenty-six young women from two countries, Canada and France, were exposed either to fourteen photographs of the thin ideal or to the same images airbrushed to make the models look slightly larger. They next completed a lexical decision task with positive self-related transitive verbs as stimuli (e.g., ‘To like myself’). As expected, women exposed to the thin-ideal models took longer to correctly identify self-liking verbs compared to women who were exposed to slightly larger models. No effects were found on other positive verbs, and there were no effects of the country. The results suggest that social comparison with the thin ideal reduces implicit self-liking among young women

Automatic social comparison: Cognitive load facilitates an increase in negative thought accessibility after thin ideal exposure among women

Women are routinely exposed to images of extremely slim female bodies (the thin ideal) in advertisements, even if they do not necessarily pay much attention to these images. We hypothesized that paradoxically, it is precisely in such conditions of low attention that the impact of the social comparison with the thin ideal might be the most pronounced. To test this prediction, one hundred and seventy-three young female participants were exposed to images of the thin ideal or of women’s fashion accessories. They were allocated to either a condition of high (memorizing 10 digits) or low cognitive load (memorizing 4 digits). The main dependent measure was implicit: mean recognition latency of negative words, relative to neutral words, as assessed by a lexical decision task. The results showed that thin-ideal exposure did not affect negative word accessibility under low cognitive load but that it increased it under high cognitive load. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that social comparison with the thin ideal is an automatic process, and contribute to explain why some strategies to prevent negative effects of thin-ideal exposure are inefficient

Can we avoid comparing each other? Automatic character of the process of social comparison with the ideal of feminine beauty

La motivation qu'a l'être humain à se comparer aux autres est considérée par plusieurs auteurs comme un besoin fondamental. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous dressons le constat qu'en dépit des travaux réalisés, une vacuité persiste quant au caractère automatique de ce processus. Sur ces bases, la thèse défendue dans le présent travail est que la comparaison sociale est un processus automatique. Les études réalisées dans le cadre de cette thèse avaient donc pour objectif premier de tester les critères d'automaticité définis par Bargh (1994) en induisant la comparaison sociale avec l'idéal de minceur, érigé en standard de beauté féminine. Nous avons émis l'hypothèse que la comparaison sociale serait inconsciente, efficace, non intentionnelle et incontrôlable. Au travers de trois articles et deux études non publiées, nous avons conclu que la comparaison sociale est inconsciente, efficace et probablement non-intentionnelle. Ces premiers résultats suggèrent donc que la comparaison sociale est un processus automatique. Ils ont ensuite été corroborés et étendus par la démonstration de l'inefficacité d'une des stratégies actuellement utilisées pour lutter contre les effets négatifs de l'idéal de minceur. En effet, nous avons émis la seconde hypothèse selon laquelle la stratégie des démentis, reposant sur le principe que la comparaison sociale est contrôlée, serait inefficace. L'étude et la méta-analyse rapportées dans deux articles valident l'hypothèse en suggérant l'inefficacité de cette stratégie. Enfin, dans deux études rapportées dans le dernier article, nous suggérons qu'une stratégie basée sur des processus associatifs est plus efficace pour lutter contre les effets de l'exposition à l'idéal de minceur. Pris ensemble, ces travaux suggèrent que le processus de comparaison sociale est un processus automatique.Human motivation to compare themselves to each other's is considered by several authors as a fundamental need. In the present dissertation, we identify a lack in the literature concerning the automatic nature of this process, despite prior research in this field. On these grounds, the thesis defended in this work is that social comparison is an automatic process. Studies conducted in this dissertation thus aimed to test the features of automaticity, as defined by Bargh (1994), by inducing social comparison process with the thin-ideal, glorified as the golden standard of female beauty. We hypothesized that social comparison would be unconscious, efficient, unintentional, and uncontrollable. Based on three articles and two unpublished studies, we concluded that social comparison is unconscious, efficient and probably unintentional. These initial results thus suggested that social comparison is automatic. They were then corroborated and extended by the demonstration of the inefficiency of one of the current strategies used to tackle negative consequences of thin-ideal exposure. Indeed, our second hypothesis was that the disclaimer strategy, which is based on the idea that social comparison is a controlled process, are inefficient. The study and meta-analysis reported in two articles support this hypothesis, suggesting the inefficiency of this strategy. Finally, in the two studies presented in the last article, we suggest that a strategy based on associative processes could be more efficient in attenuating the negative consequences of thin-ideal exposure. Taken together, this work strongly suggests that social comparison is an automatic process

The woman who wasn't there: Converging evidence that subliminal social comparison affects self-evaluation

International audienceAlthough social comparison is often considered as an automatic process, the evidence in support of this idea is weak and inconclusive. In this paper, we reexamined the question of automaticity in social comparison by testing the hypothesis that subliminal social comparison affects explicit self-evaluations. In two high-powered experiments, young women were subliminally exposed (or not) to a high standard of comparison (media images of ultra-thin women). Next, they made explicit self-evaluations of their body appearance anxiety. Using both between-participants (Experiment 1) and within-participant (Experiment 2) designs, we found converging evidence that subliminal exposure to the thin ideal increases body appearance anxiety in women. Using Bayes factors as measures of evidence, the present experiments provided substantial (Experiment 1) and very strong (Experiment 2) evidence that social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations. The present experiments can be easily replicated using a standardized procedure (replication script) that is publicly available on the Open Science Framework. We discuss how these findings contribute to reestablish confidence in the modern view of social comparison as an automatic process

‘Large Is Beautiful!’ Associative Retraining Changes Implicit Beliefs About Thinness and Beauty and Decreases Women’s Appearance Anxiety

International audienceMany women believe that they must be thin to be beautiful (Grogan, 2006). In comparison to men, women more heavily invest in and have more negative body image (Davis et al., 2020; Muth & Cash, 1997; Quittkat et al., 2019). This is associated with many undesirable outcomes, such as anxiety and unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, binge eating, physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, intentional vomiting, consumption of laxative, diuretic, or weight loss pills, and even suicide attempts in adolescents (Cash et al., 2004; Neumark-Sztainer et al., 2006; Rodríguez-Cano et al., 2006). Therefore, developing efficient ways to maintain a positive body image is a worthy pursuit for both theoretical and practical reasons. In the present work, we examined one potentially efficient strategy: the modification of semantic associations between thinness and beauty. We reasoned that if this association is weakened, then the implicit belief that thinness is a defining attribute of female beauty will also be attenuated. Further, if such a belief plays an important role in shaping women's body image concerns, then the techniques used to weaken the thin-beautiful association should also affect self-perception in terms of physical attractiveness and preoccupation with physical appea

Stereotype-Consistent Recall: From Subtle Gender Cues to Autobiographical Memory Biases

International audienceIntegrating research on stereotype priming and reconstructive memory, we hypothesized that the exposureto gender-related cues influences autobiographicalrecall. We showed that the more participants had stereotyped associations the more they reported stereotype-consistent memories following the exposition togender-related cues

Descriptive statistics per sample.

<p>Descriptive statistics per sample.</p

Mean recognition latencies (in milliseconds) for positive and negative words as a function of exposure condition and cognitive load (adjusted and unadjusted for neutral words).

<p>Mean recognition latencies (in milliseconds) for positive and negative words as a function of exposure condition and cognitive load (adjusted and unadjusted for neutral words).</p