Self-fulfilling objectification in relationships: The effects of men’s objectifying expectations on women’s self-objectification during conflict in romantic relationships

ABSTRACT

Interpersonal objectification shapes women’s sense of self, increasing self-objectification. While objectification is theorized to occur with consequences for self-objectification in romantic relationships, little research has examined this possibility. This experiment sampled 61 heterosexual couples to examine effects of objectification in relationships. Men focused on their partner’s appearance, or her as a person, before interacting with her. Although men in the appearance-focus condition did not self-report objectifying or dehumanizing their partner more than men in the personality-focus condition, women whose partner was in the appearance-focus condition reported higher levels of self-objectification relative to women whose partner was in the personality-focus condition. Discussion centers on the nature of objectification in relationships and the role of partners in determining women’s sense of self.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual objectification
• self-objectification
• romantic relationships
• mixed-sex dyads
• dehumanization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A sensitivity analysis conducted using G*power (Faul et al., 2009) revealed that with a sample size of 61 participants we had the ability to detect medium-to-large effects (ds =.50–.80).

2. Men and women also completed additional self-report measures not central to the current investigation and are therefore not reported here.

3. Subscales assessed animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization (Bastian & Haslam, 2010). We did not expect differences for type of dehumanization; we retained the total scale for our analyses. As in other research, these subscales suffered from poor scale reliability (αs =.61 and.68) and yielded similar null results as the total score.