Hot or not? How self-view threat influences avoidance of attractiveness feedback

Abstract

In two studies, we examined whether people’s decision to receive evaluations of their own attractiveness depended on whether the evaluations came from sources that might threaten their self-views. Participants believed that evaluators rated their attractiveness based on a photograph taken earlier and ostensibly uploaded to a website. Participants then received the opportunity to view the attractiveness ratings from the evaluators. In both studies, and in a meta-analysis including two pilot studies that are reported in Supplemental Materials online, participants – particularly women – rated feedback as more threatening and avoided receiving feedback more when the ratings came from high-threat evaluators (university peers) than from low-threat evaluators (students at another university, older adults, or children). The robustness of this overall effect was confirmed in the meta-analysis. These results suggest that self-view threat can prompt information avoidance.

Keywords:

• Information avoidance
• self-view threat
• attractiveness

Notes

1. When degrees of freedom are not whole, we applied a penalty to the degrees of freedom because of unequal variance between groups (Levene, 1960).