Construal level moderates a local dominance effect of appearance comparisons in undergraduate women

Abstract

Body image concerns are pervasive within university environments. In this study, we suggest that high rates of body image concerns among undergraduate women may be due, in part, to a local dominance effect of appearance comparisons. That is, undergraduate women may increasingly make upward social comparisons with a predominantly thin and fit student population, rather than downward or lateral social comparisons with the size-diverse global population. The present research tested for and found evidence of this local dominance effect in Study 1 (N = 50), and tested a construal level manipulation as a moderating factor in Study 2 (N = 421).Results suggest that a concrete mindset leads to a local dominance effect, such that self-evaluations are influenced more by local comparisons than global; however, an

Moderators of the big‐fish‐little‐pond effect in educational settings: A scoping review

“…Further, although progress has been made in identifying several viable moderators, a few promising moderators await future testing. Experimental studies conducted by social psychologists indicate that the adverse effect of having low rank in a high rank group may be reduced among people who strongly identify with the group in question (Gardner et al., 2002; McFarland & Buehler, 1995), are happy (Lyubomirsky et al., 2001), or adopt an abstract rather than a concrete mindset (Bruchmann et al., 2021; Bruchmann & Evans, 2013). These experimental findings are generally limited to a relatively small number of students at a single school, yet they suggest that each of these factors may be worth testing in large BFLPE studies conducted by educational psychologists.…”