The level of popularity you experienced in childhood and adolescence is still affecting you today in ways that you may not even realize. Learn about how psychologists study popularity and how these same concepts can be used in adulthood to be more successful at work, become better parents, and have a happier life.
Body Attractiveness and Popularity
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From the course by The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Psychology of Popularity
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From the lesson
Why are Some People More Popular Than Others? (Part 2)
We will review why facial and body attractiveness plays a role in popularity and how parents can make
their children more popular.
Meet the Instructors
Dr. Mitch PrinsteinJohn Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Author of Popular: The Power of Likeability in a Status-Obsessed World
UNC Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
[MUSIC]
Hi, welcome back.
We've been talking about the role that attractiveness plays in popularity, but
we've been focusing specifically on facial attractiveness.
Now we're going to talk about body attractiveness.
Specifically, we're going to talk about obesity and
how obesity may be related to popularity.
As you probably know, the way that we measure obesity is by looking at body mass
index and there are some equation's here that help us to understand what someones
body mass index is.
Of course, it's flawed to some extent,
because it doesn't take into account muscle mass.
But in general, what we do find is that using this figure,
we can understand those that might be underweight of normal weight,
those who might be a bit overweight and also those that might be obese.
And what's been very interesting, especially here in North America.
Perhaps in America, the United States more than anywhere is
that the country is getting very obese.
Let me show you a little bit about that.
The CDC here in Atlanta, Georgia has given us some data over many, many years.
And if you haven't seen these slides before,
you might be interested to see what this looks like.
In the mid 80s, they started by coloring each state based on what
percentage of those in the state met criteria for being overweight or obese.
And what you can see here is that predominantly in the South and
in the Midwest areas, there was some rate of folks being obese.
But there's a different side for every year and
as we get closer and closer, we'll see that more and
more and more states started becoming more and more obese.
Soon, you saw that by the early 90s, there was an entirely new category
of percentage of those states whose members were obese.
And as you'll see with these slides, as they increase in color and change colors,
you'll see that there are new categories,
because states are becoming even more disproportionately obese.
And as we go through here, the 90s, going on and
on, now you can see that there are no states [LAUGH] that
have not a significantly high percentage of folks obese.
Now at least one out of every five,
soon one out of every three people are obese in some of these states.
As we get closer and closer to the present day,
the entire country is turning more and more and more obese.
Taking us all the way to 2010.
So what you might think is that given the fact that over these past 30 years or
so, we've seen the country getting more and more obese.
Perhaps, we would see a greater acceptance of more of larger body shapes.
And perhaps, our focus on obesity as being stigmatized and
something related to unpopularity would go down,
given that one out of every three Americans is starting to have the body
shape that people have suggested is not okay is not popular.
It turns out, it's exactly the opposite.
Even though the country is getting heavier,
there is more and more of a push for smaller body shapes.
And of course, we see this on every billboard and every magazine and
every commercial.
But perhaps most surprisingly,
we're seeing this marketed to children more and more.
So here what you see is a popular character called Strawberry Shortcake,
which is a little cartoon character designed for young girls and
boys who are interested in her stories.
And you can see here what Strawberry Shortcake looks like in the 70s and 80s,
what she looks like in the 90s and now what she looks like.
And what you'll see dramatically is that her body shape has gone
from what toddlers typically look like to now shaped like and
even posed like what a young, thin, woman would be looking like.
Suggesting that for some reason, we are socializing children to feel like even at
a toddler age, they should look unnaturally, skinny and they should be
standing and posed in ways that are kind of like they teach young starlets
to pose on the runway when they're at the academy awards with one shoulder up and
one hand out and their knee a little bit bent.
Of course, the same things happening for boys.
For boys rather than a focus on obesity, there's focus on lean muscularity.
Here's what Hans Solo and Luke Sky Walker looked like in the 70s when
Star Wars first came out and here are those same characters' dolls today.
And what you can see is that even though the movies, of course, have never changed,
it's the same movie from all the way back then,
these characters now look like they've been on steroids.
And these are characters that are all puffed up and very, very muscle bound.
Again, why are we sending this message to young children that they're heroes?
Are those that look unnaturally large and muscular?
Here's another example.
You can see here what the Care Bears, another cartoon characters designed for
toddlers and young children.
What they looked like when they were young?
They look like bears.
They're plump, they have nice, round limbs.
But here are those same Care Bears in their current incarnation that you can see
on the right side of the screen, those same bears now look so skinny.
And again, one of them is posed in that exact same way with one arm out and
one shoulder up and one knee bent in that kind of runway pose.
Why do we need thin bears?
They're bears.
[LAUGH] Why is it important that we show skinny bears to young children?
For some reason, we are sending messages to young toddlers that the people or
the bears that they really like, that they relate to,
that they want to watch are thin.
They're unnaturally thin in ways that don't mirror what real toddlers look
like or even animals look like.
Well, not surprisingly then, we see that there is a relationship between
body attractiveness and popularity even in young children.
And one really interesting study that was done by Bell & Morgan
about 15 years ago or so, suggested that there may be a reason why
it is that young kids even stigmatize those who are obese.
What they did was they did a study where they showed kids a videotape of a boy or
a girl.
They showed all their boy participants a young boy and
all of their female participants a young girl.
They had one boy who participated in three experimental videos.
In all three of the videos, they described this boy as being a nice,
friendly, happy, kind, young boy and the same for the girl.
But what happened is that in one of those, they showed a picture of the boy,
who was in his regular clothing and he happened to be an average weight boy.
And they said again, all of these nice things about him and
then they asked the kids, how much do you like this kid?
How much do you think they would be popular?
And how much do you think you would want to play with them?
Then they had the exact same boy, they said the exact same things about them.
This time, wear kind of a fat suit.
Wear something under their clothes that made their body look like they were obese.
And then they made a third video, where again,
same boy, same narrative about that boy.
This time, they wore the same fat suit.
But this time, there was a voiceover that said that this boy, and again,
they did the same thing for the girl, had a medical disorder that made it hard for
their metabolism to digest food the same as others.
And for that reason, they were overweight in a way that they cannot control.
Well, the results from this experiment showed that kids clearly had a preference
in who they thought was the most popular and who they wanted to play with the most.
And that was the kid who was the average weight child, as well as the one
who was wearing the larger bodied suit with a medical explanation.
They were equally happy to be friends with both of those children, numbers one and
three or four and six in the graphic that you see.
There were no gender differences, they were equally happy to be friends with
them, thought they would be popular and had positive associations.
But the child who was obese and did not have a medical explanation for
being that size, they were stigmatized and penalized for that.
They were not well liked, it was thought that they would not be popular and
kids were less likely to play with them.
In fact, in other research, people have found that when looking at folks with all
kinds of physical disabilities or all kinds of limitations in what they're able
to do, they're most likely to so stigmatize those that are obese.
Because kids report, even young, young children that they believe that
that it the fault of the person who is obese and they blame them for that.
Which is of course, horribly unfortunate and inaccurate,
because it is not something that can be always controlled.
So, it's an unfair stigma.
Of course, we see that among females,
there is this tremendous emphasis towards unrealistically thin bodies and
all kinds of ways that that plays out for young girls.
Especially, as they get into adolescence and are expected to retain a prepubescent
body shape, even as their bodies start becoming more naturally curvy.
Interesting, recently there's been some suggestion that even males are starting to
experience some of what females have been experiencing for many, many decades and
that's been referred to as an Adonis Complex.
The idea that as females have become more and more sufficient in providing for
themselves and not needing men very much to procreate,
to support them, that males now need to be emphasizing more of
their own physical attractiveness in order to attract a mate.
And over the same period of time that we've seen the shift in generals,
we've seen an increase in male's desire to adopt a lean muscular shape.
And interestingly in our own research, when we've looked at social reputation,
we've found that those boys who report that they have a lean muscular shape,
those in the middle of the scale here are in fact,
the ones that are the most popular.
They are most popular as rated by their peers as compared to those that are very
skinny and especially, as compared to those that are obese.
So while there's a huge emphasis on thinness for
females that we've been knowing about for decades and decades and decades,
there's an emerging increase in the role of lean muscularity for males and
that being strongly associated with popularity.
So over all, of course,
you already know that there's a huge emphasis on body shapes.
But that seems to be happening even among young children,
even despite the fact that these children are growing up in a context,
where fewer and fewer people have those ideal shapes.
There's more of an emphasis on these idealized silhouettes, thin for
girls and muscular for boys that even young kids are aspiring to.
And frankly, engaging in very dangerous behaviors to try and
maintain as a way of perhaps increasing their popularity.
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