Excessive Image Concern and Willingness to Incur Personal Cost in the Experience and Perception of Vanity

Abstract

Vanity has been defined traditionally as excessive pride. We propose that vanity is a negatively viewed social behavior fueled by excessive concern over one's public image, characterized by a willingness to incur personal cost because of this concern. In Study 1, autobiographical accounts of personal and witnessed vanity were contrasted with personal accounts of pride and positive self-presentation. Vanity accounts were more characterized by personal cost and negativity than pride and positive self-presentation, and were more related to image concern than the pride. Study 2 used scenario manipulations of the personal cost and reasonableness of a target's cosmetic procedure. Higher cost of and less reasonable motives for the procedure enhanced vanity perceptions in ways distinguishable from hubristic and authentic pride.

Keywords::

• Vanity
• Pride
• Self-presentation

The authors thank Samantha Roubichaud for her help with developing the materials for Study 2 and running participants. We also thank the action editor, Rich Gramzow, and the reviewers of this manuscript for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

^1. Specifically, we used items from the public self-consciousness (four items) and social anxiety (three items) subscales of the Self-consciousness Scale (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975), the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (four items; Leary, 1983), and the Vanity Scale (four items; Netemeyer et al., 1995).

^2. Aside from a main effect for gender in the breast augmentation scenario, the results were unaffected by version. Thus, this factor was eliminated from analyses. Vignette version did not create any systematic effects and was also eliminated.