Does body shape change affect the reasoning about personality traits

Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2020-09-13

石晓慧 李梦婷 任俊

Abstract： " People tend to make inferences about other people's personality traits based on their appearance, which is actually a phenomenon of "judging people by their appearance". Body shape, as an important aspect of appearance, plays an important role in shaping the impression of others. A large number of studies have shown that body shape does affect people's reasoning about their personality traits, and then form impression management. People generally have stereotypes of "fat-negative" and "thin-positive". People usually have a negative view of obesity, but on the contrary, they make positive comments on lean body. However, it is worth noting that most of the past researches focused on the reasoning of the fixed body shape, and there is little research on whether the process of body shape change will change the personality traits that people formed in the past. Does the process of becoming fat and thin, relative to the fixed state of obesity and thin, affect people's trait reasoning results? This study focused on the dynamic process of body shape change, and intended to take two experiments to investigate whether the body shape changes in different directions and to different degrees, whether it would affect its personality traits reasoning. In Experiment 1, we investigated the inference results of personality traits when the body shape changed from thin to fat and from fat to thin compared with obesity and lean body shape. Since Experiment 1 focused on the extreme body shape of obesity and thinness, we added pictures of normal body shape in Experiment 2. In Experiment 2, we investigated the reasoning results of personality traits of subjects when the trend of body shape change was the same, but the degree of change was different. That is, when the body shape changes between three levels of obesity, normal, and thin, whether there is significant change in the inference results of the participants’ personality traits. The results suggested that the reasoning of personality trait between body shape change and body shape invariance is basically the same, the contrast body shape has been obese, the body shape from thin to fat is more negative, the contrast body shape has been thin, the body shape from fat to thin is more positive. Whether male or female picture material, contrast body shape from thin to fat, body shape from fat to thin personality trait reasoning results are more positive. In Experiment 2, we add normal body shape pictures and the results suggested that the inferential results of personality traits from fat to normal were more positive than from fat to thin, and from thin to normal personality traits were more positive than from thin to fat. Two experiments suggested that the participants' own BMI index and gender were important factors influencing the speculation of personality traits of others. Based on these results, it is concluded that body shape changes can affect people's trait reasoning results. Being too fat or too thin can lead to negative personality trait reasoning. People prefer normal body shape.

Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review

 Hits 3638  Downloads 1250  Comment