Consuming Thoughts

Understanding eating disorders and body image.

Pamela Keel, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Florida State University. See full bio

June 19, 2009, Gender

Smarter than she looks

Why you can't judge a book by its cover.

Rhodes scholar finalist, graduate from Stanford University with honors, Harvard Law School student, news anchor, author of 4 books, Executive Director of foundation for veterans . . . this list of accomplishments brings a certain image to mind, and that image is not a 20-something year old woman wearing a tiara and walking down a pageant runway with a bouquet of roses. Yet, these are only some of the accomplishments of Miss America winners beginning around 1989. What's my point? Pageant contestants have gotten a bad rap for being stupid because of weak responses during the question and answer period. Were the answers stupid? Sure. Does this mean that the contestants are stupid? Not necessarily.

A psychological study published over 10-years ago by Frederickson, Roberts, Noll, Quinn, and Twenge in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology demonstrated that having a female research participant try on a swimsuit decreased her performance on a math test by more than 25% compared to having her try on a sweater (i.e., if she would have gotten 100 questions on a 100-item test correct in a sweater, she got fewer than 75 of those questions correct in a swimsuit). Why? According to the authors, self-objectification (viewing ones body from an observers' perspective) interfered with women's mental performance by drawing attention away from the math test. Of interest, these results have been replicated by recent studies, suggesting that the finding was not a fluke but represents a real phenomenon.

If having a woman try on a swimsuit by herself in a dressing room leads to such a significant decrease in her cognitive performance, what hope does a pageant contestant stand of forming an intelligent answer in front of a panel of judges and an audience who are explicitly evaluating her on her physical appearance? Not much.

Of note, within the research study, participants' math performance was significantly correlated with their scores on a college entrance math test. So, generally speaking, smarter people will do better at forming a smarter answer under challenging circumstances. Thus, one may be able to validly conclude that a smarter answer reflects a smarter contestant. However, it would not be possible to conclude how smart (or stupid) a given contestant is in absolute terms because all of the contestants are smarter than they look.