Appearance ideals and food choices

Background

Consumer culture ideals of materialism and appearance are known to be associated with lower well-being in adults and adolescents, and our recent work has begun to show that these links exist in younger children as well.  However, we lack the experimental work needed to establish the causal direction of these links -- i.e., do consumer culture ideals actually lead to lower well-being, or is it simply the case that people with lower well-being go on to endorse these ideals?  One study by Chaplin and Roedder (2007) experimentally manipulated self-esteem and found that children who had been primed with high self-esteem scored lower on a materialism measure than those who were not primed.  The results of this study suggest that children who feel less good about themselves are more likely to endorse materialistic ideals, supporting the argument that materialistic ideals may be adopted as a coping strategy for dealing with underlying insecurity. 

However, there is good reason to suspect that internalisation of materialistic ideals can be the cause of feeling less good about one’s self.  For example, self-determination theory suggests that by focusing on extrinsic values (e.g., materialism and appearance), intrinsic needs of good relationships, competence and autonomy are less likely to be met, resulting in lower satisfaction with oneself.

Main aim

To examine whether priming children with consumer culture ideals leads to lower well-being and less healthy behaviours compared with children primed with intrinsic values or not primed at all.

Hypotheses

• Children primed with materialistic ideals will score higher on materialistic motives than children primed with intrinsic values, and (in a hypothetical 'windfall' task) will spend more for themselves and give away less money
• Children primed with appearance values will score lower on body-esteem and appearance motives, and (in a hypothetical 'build-a-lunch' task) will select foods containing fewer calories compared with children in other conditions
• Children primed with materialistic and appearance ideals will score lower on life satisfaction than children primed with intrinsic ideals

 Methods

• 127 Year 5 and 6 (aged 9-11 years) children from primary schools in Brighton and Hove, UK took part in this study.  Children were briefed about the study, and then, in same sex groups of three, went through the following procedure:

1)    Filled out a measure of identity.

2)    Watched videos designed to prime either materialistic, appearance, or intrinsic values (based on 'video diaries' of a child actor either talking about the money and material things they wanted, the way they wanted to look, or the things they enjoyed doing in the run-up to Christmas), or a neutral video showing abstract geometrical shapes.  All videos were approximately 3 minutes in duration.  Children were randomly allocated to one of the four video conditions.

3)    Completed behavioural measures of money allocation (how much of a hypothetical £100 windfall to spend, save, or give), and made food choices (to build a lunch from a selection of pictured foods, including various options with different calorie content).

4)    Completed questionnaire measures of well-being, body-esteem and materialistic and appearance motives and ideals.

• Due to any potentially negative feelings caused by the materialistic and appearance priming in this study, all children were taken through a thorough debrief where they talked about positive things (e.g., favourite school trip), were told about the nature of the study, and advised to talk with an appropriate member of staff at their school if any negative feelings persisted.

 Preliminary findings

• Children primed for appearance ideals subsequently scored significantly lower on body-esteem than children primed with intrinsic values.
• Children primed for materialistic ideals subsequently scored significantly higher on materialistic motives than children primed for intrinsic values.
• No significant differences were found between conditions regarding either of the behavioural measures, life satisfaction or appearance motives.

 Conclusions

• It is clear from the results of this study that even after very short exposure to consumer culture primes, children’s motives and feelings about themselves can be manipulated, at least temporarily.
• The results indicate that for children, being primed to focus on one’s appearance has a negative impact on one’s body-esteem and being primed to focus on money and material things may strengthen materialistic social motives, compared with being primed to focus on the things one intrinsically enjoys. 
• However, it appears that the effects of these consumer culture primes were not powerful enough to change children’s intended behaviour with regard to money and food choices.  This may be because of the relative weak effect of the manipulation, in that a fairly subtle 3 minute video diary may simply not be adequate for leading to the internalisation of values, which is necessary to change actual behaviour.
• Results also indicated that although differences were found between children primed with consumer culture vs. intrinsic values, there were no differences when making comparisons with children who saw the neutral video.  This suggests that while it may be important to guide children away from the potentially negative effects of greater consumer culture ideals, it may be equally important to focus on fostering children’s intrinsic values in the process.
• It’s worth making the final point that if even a one-off brief manipulation of consumer culture values can have significant effects on children’s thoughts and feelings, then we need to consider the impact that a daily bombardment of advertisements and associated peer pressure may have on children.

Two further experiments (analyses still ongoing)

• One follow-up experiment extended our first by focusing in more detail on children’s prospective eating behaviours (food choices for a hypothetical lunch) in response to watching short videos that either portrayed body-perfect ideals as profiled in consumer culture or a guess-the-animal game (control).

• We also carried out a third experiment to test the proposed moderating role of identity by examining whether the negative link between consumer culure values/motives and well-being is weaker among those with secure, rather than insecure identities.  This experiment involved providing a temporary boost to some (randomly allocated) children's sense of identity security by providing them with feedback that their written self-descriptions (things that they are most proud of) were rated very positively by a peer panel.  These children's responses to subsequent questionnaires on consumer culture values and well-being were contrasted to those of children who received less of this positive feedback.