The Impact of Men on Women's Eating

Catherine A. Sanderson, Ph.D. — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:15:57 +0000

Let me start with an apology ... I agreed (with great excitement!) to write this Body Talk blog! Then, my semester started, and each time I started to do an entry, multiple tasks (students with exam questions, papers to grade, book deadlines from my editor) simply intruded. So, here is my new plan: each week I will do a new blog entry that summarizes classic or current research on body imagine, and then links that research to real-world events and experiences. I hope this approach proves to be easier for me to manage, and will be of interest to many readers!

I'm going to start with one of my favorite studies (and one of the favorites of many of my students), which was conducted by Mori, Chaiken, Pliner (1987). In this study, female college students came into the psychology lab to participate in a study in which they were asked to have a conversation with a male student. Before the conversation, the women read a background sheet about the partner, which either made him/her seem desirable (interested in travel, athletics, photography, wanted to go to law school, and single) or undesirable (no interests other than watching TV, no plans other than making money). They were then asked to have a 20-minute conversation, and as the experimenter left the room, she gestured to a bowl of candy (M & Ms) and said "oh, these were left over from a party -- help yourself". Researchers then measured how many candies the subjects ate under the two conditions: when the women were talking with the desirable partner and when they were talking with the undesirable partner.

I bet you can guess what they found: Women ate significantly more M & Ms if their partner was undesirable than if their partner was desirable! This study is a classic example of how women deliberately present an image to men in certain situations -- and specifically that when women want to appear attractive, they don't eat much.

When I talk about this study in class, women almostly always know what I'm talking about -- they recognize their own self-presentation regarding food in many situations, from only drinking diet soda, to only eating salads on dates!

And this tendency to use light eating as a way of presenting one's self as attractive and desirable starts early, in part due to the consistent pressures on women, and even girls, to present themselves as thin (which apparently includes not ever really feeling hungry and certainly not liking chocolate). I remember that as a high school student, in a year and a half of dating my first real boyfriend I basically never consumed food in front of him!

I'll talk in a future blog entry about the hazards of this type of self-presentation on women's perceptions (and misperceptions) of eating, exercise, and body image norms.

Welcome to Body Talk

Catherine A. Sanderson, Ph.D. — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:29:36 +0000

Welcome to my blog, Body Talk, which will explore how personality and social factors influence eating behavior. As a woman, a mother of a four-year-old, and a college professor, I'll be focusing more on issues of how such factors influence women's eating and exercise behavior, but I'll also try to find examples that relate to men (and yes, such factors DO exist -- just fewer people study them so we know less about what they are and how they work).

Here are some of the topics look forward to writing about in the weeks/months/years (?) ahead:

The consequences of having very thin images of women in the media on "average women's" body self-esteem. For example, if you average the Miss America winners over time, the composite winner has an average weight of just over 121 pounds; her height is 5 feet, 6-1/2 inches (which would translate to a pretty small BMI).

Why college women feel more ashamed buying a Snickers bar in a drugstore than buying tampons, condoms, or a pregnancy test. As one who really like chocolates, this finding really points to the pressure women feel to appear as if they aren't ever hungry in order to appear attractive and feminine.

Why women often see other women as thinner than they actually are. This finding may surprise you ... but in my own research at both Princeton University and Amherst College, I've found that women often misperceive other women on campus as eating less and exercising more than they themselves do. Unfortunately, this perception (even though it is wrong) is associated with more frequent disordered eating behaviors.

If there are topics you are particularly interested in related to body image, let me know and I'll try to cover as many as I can. I look forward to an interesting dialogue about the many factors that influence eating, exercise, and body image ... thanks for sharing the journey with me.