The Thick and the Thin of It: Contextual Effects in Body Perception

Abstract

This research investigated how and when exposure to different body contexts alters body ideals used in judgment. University students judged the width and pleasantness of human figures, with context manipulated by presenting mostly narrow or mostly wide forms. In Experiment 1, silhouettes were presented simultaneously on the page. In Experiment 2, figures were presented successively on a computer screen as detailed pictures. In both experiments, width ratings were consistent with A. Parducci's (1995) range-frequency theory, which predicted the same figure is judged thinner in the wide context. Pleasantness ratings were well described by an ideal-point model that used a gaussian similarity function, with the ideal shifting to a narrower width in the narrow context. The assimilative shifts in ideals with mere exposure to a small set of contextual stimuli supports the hypothesis that mass media presentations of ultrathin individuals may lead women to adopt a "thin ideal" in judging themselves and others. Although exposure to narrow or wide sets of figures had no consistent effect on measures of body satisfaction, individual differences in body satisfaction were related to ideal-point shifts. Women who were dissatisfied with their own bodies consistently used thin ideals to judge body images and were insensitive to the contextual manipulation of body image.

Context effects on tempo and pleasantness judgments for Beatles songs

“…Although Wedell and Pettibone's (1999) research showed a moderate correlation between these effects, subsequent research has provided evidence for dissociation. For example, Wedell et al (2005) demonstrated that participants in their sample who held highly negative self-appraisals of body image did not show the assimilation of ideals effect on body image evaluation, even though they did show the usual contrast effect on judgments of thinness. Likewise, Pettibone and Wedell (2007) demonstrated that when evaluations were prompted by labels for stimuli learned in the same encoding context, large contrast effects occurred for feature judgments with no accompanying shifts in ideals for pleasantness judgments.…”

“…An advantage of exemplar models is that they can account for contextual effects that prototype models cannot, since context may be used to recruit the particular exemplars used to extract a prototype. Because shifts in ideals occur rapidly with shifts in context for both unfamiliar and familiar stimuli (Pettibone & Wedell, 2007;Wedell & Pettibone, 1999;Wedell et al, 2005), we posit a prototype model in which the prototype is constructed based on the retrieved exemplars, with recent exemplars weighted more heavily than older exemplars. Within our prototype model, we represent the ideal point as an average of recent and older memories as follows:…”

“…The attribute value at which the function peaks is referred to as an ideal point, reflecting the most pleasant attribute value (Coombs, 1964). Research exploring context effects on ideal points has primarily examined preference-related judgments in perceptual domains and has overwhelmingly found that the ideal point shifts toward the values of contextual stimuli Pettibone & Wedell, 2007;Riskey, Parducci, & Beauchamp, 1979;Wedell & Pettibone, 1999;Wedell, Santoyo & Pettibone, 2005; although for an exception, see Cooke, Janiszewski, Cunha, Nasco, & de Wilde, 2004). Panel B of Fig.…”

Assessment of health in human faces is context-dependent

“…For example, in human experiments the trade-off might be between price and quality (Doyle et al 1999) whereas in animal experiments the options might vary in both amount and quality of food (Morgan et al 2014). However, although less frequently reported, it seems that both human and animals will also display contextdependent preferences when the options vary in only a single dimension (Morgan et al 2012, Wedell et al 2005). …”

“…It is possible, then, that during mate choice the judgement of the attractiveness of other individuals is again context-dependent and there is at least some evidence that decisions over attractiveness or health of possible mates might be relative rather than absolute (Dougherty and Shuker 2015, Kenrick et al, 1989, Wanke et al, 2001, Wedell et al, 1987, Wedell et al, 2005. For example, males presented with images of attractive female faces rated subsequent images of average female faces as less attractive than did males presented with images of average female faces (Kenrick and Gutierres, 1980).…”