Body Esteem: An Exception to Self‐Enhancing Illusions?¹

Abstract

Participants were 192 university students (96 males, 96 females) who completed the Body Esteem scale (Franzoi & Shields, 1984) under instructions to rate their feelings about their own bodies, rate their feelings about a specific or “average” student's body, and rate the importance they and others attached to these feelings. One of the findings is that when individuals perceived themselves as less positive on a particular desirable physical trait, they also rated the trait as less important to possess in the first place. The only exception to this was women's weight concern. It was also found that men generally rated themselves higher on body‐esteem subscales than they rated other men, while women did not exhibit such self‐serving evaluations of their bodies. One implication from these results is that the same self‐enhancement strategies successfully employed by individuals in other areas of self‐evaluations were not successful in enhancing one's body esteem, especially women's weight concern.

Role models' influence on smoking reduction

“…Participants did report, however, that they experienced greater motivation when reading about a negative body image role model versus a negative fitness role model. The authors argued that these findings demonstrate that body image and weight-related concerns are of greater importance to young adults than are health/fitness concerns, consistent with past findings (Powell, Matacin, & Stuart, 2001). One reason that young adults are showing a greater concern for physical appearance and how this affects others' evaluations of them today than in the past is perhaps due to increasing sizes in social networks among young people (Durvasula & Lysonski, 2008).…”

Body Use and Reference Group Impact: With Whom Do We Compare Our Bodies?

“…It may also explain why exposure to those who match these two different body ideals appear to have different effects on women and men. Men may be more likely than women to have a self-serving bias regarding their body evaluations (Franzoi et al, 1989;Powell et al, 2001) because gender-shaped cultural standards allow them to be less attentive to male body ideals. In essence, gender socialization may make it more likely that men can attend to same-sex individuals who represent the male body-asprocess ideal without inducing the type of competitive comparison process that appears to be common among women when they attend to same-sex persons who represent the female body-as-object ideal.…”

“…In an experiential-sampling study of young adults' daily body awareness tendencies, Franzoi, Kessenich, and Sugrue (1989) found that whereas men were more likely to focus on their bodies when their body evaluations were positive rather than negative, women's situational body awareness was not influenced by the valence of their current body attitudes. Similarly, Powell, Matacin, and Stuart (2001) found that, unlike women, men generally rated their body aspects more positively than they rated the body aspects of other same-sex individuals, and when they evaluated themselves less positively on a particular desirable physical trait they tended also to rate the trait as less important to possess in the first place. Together, the results of these two studies suggest that, whereas women often have difficulty dismissing some negative aspect of their bodies as unimportant, men may have a greater cultural luxury of ignoring evidence that suggests that they fall short of body ideals.…”

Not Half Bad: Self and Others’ Judgements of Body Size and Attractiveness Across the Life Span

“…Even if low self-esteem is particularly centred on body image, self-deprecating judgements should also be found for other attributes that are grounded in physical appearance. Several studies have found that body size judgements are specifically likely to show self-deprecation, even among people who make self-enhancing judgements of other attributes, including physically based attributes such as attractiveness and sexiness (Lewis and Donaghue 1999;Powell et al 2001). Thus, an explanation that relies on endemic low self-esteem in women to account for body size over-estimation is unsatisfactory.…”

“…Lewis and Donaghue (1999; see also Powell et al 2001) have argued that the relatively unvarying standards for female body size that are presented in the electronic and print media means that there is very little ambiguity in the social definitions of "normal" body weight. As self-enhancing judgements are more likely when the definition of the attribute being evaluated is ambiguous (Dunning et al 1989;Dunning and McElwee 1995), women may simply have less opportunity to define the criteria that constitute "normal" body size in a selfenhancing way than is available for many other attributes.…”