Abstract
Plastic surgery is growing in popularity. Despite this, there has been little exploration to date regarding the psychosocial consequences of seeking plastic surgery. Our study investigated how women seeking plastic surgery are perceived by others. We presented a random sample of 985 adults (men = 54%, Mage = 35.84 years, SDage = 10.59) recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk with a series of experimental stimuli consisting of a photographed woman (attractive versus unattractive) and a vignette describing an activity she plans to engage in (plastic surgery versus control activity). Participants rated stimuli on perceived warmth, competence, morality, and humanness. We ran linear mixed-effect models to assess all study hypotheses. There was a negative plastic surgery effect; that is, women seeking plastic surgery were perceived less favorably than those planning to complete control activities across all outcome variables (warmth, competence, morality, and humanness). These relationships were moderated by physical attractiveness; while attractive women planning to undergo plastic surgery were perceived less favorably than attractive women planning to engage in control activities, perceptions of unattractive individuals remained unchanged by plastic surgery status. We theorized that empathy toward unattractive women seeking plastic surgery mitigated the negative plastic surgery effect for these women. In sum, our results suggest that perceptions of attractive women are worsened when these women decide to seek cosmetic surgery. Perceptions of warmth and competence have implications for an individual's self-esteem and interpersonal relationships, while perceptions of morality and humanness can impact an individual's ability to fulfil their psychological needs. As such, we concluded that attractive women seeking plastic surgery are potentially subject to experience negative psychosocial outcomes. Future research ought to examine whether perceptions and outcomes differ for women seeking reconstructive plastic surgery (versus cosmetic plastic surgery) and whether they differ across different types of surgeries (i.e. face versus body).
Highlights
The number of individuals electing to undergo plastic surgery has steadily increased in Western societies since its introduction following the First World War [1]
Given that there is no research to date examining how attractiveness might influence person perception in appearance-enhancement contexts, we can only speculate regarding the directionality of the influence that recipient attractiveness might have on the negative plastic surgery effect
We examined whether (4a) the negative plastic surgery effect was moderated by stimuli attractiveness; that is, whether attractive and unattractive women seeking plastic surgery were subject to the negative plastic surgery effect
Summary
The number of individuals electing to undergo plastic surgery has steadily increased in Western societies since its introduction following the First World War [1]. Our study aims to establish exactly how a woman’s decision to undergo plastic surgery shapes others’ perceptions of her, irrespective of her surgical outcomes This knowledge will help contribute to our growing understanding of how society perceives plastic surgery recipients (i.e. whether they are stigmatized). Given that there is no research to date examining how attractiveness might influence person perception in appearance-enhancement contexts, we can only speculate regarding the directionality of the influence that recipient attractiveness might have on the negative plastic surgery effect. We believe that justice sensitivity might moderate perceptions of plastic surgery recipients, such that those more sensitive to injustices will perceive women intending to undergo plastic surgery less favorably. We will examine the social consequences of undergoing plastic surgery by examining how women who seek plastic surgery are perceived across four domains: warmth, competence, morality, and humanness. We explored whether (4b) the strength of this relationship differed as a function of participant justice sensitivity and/or disgust sensitivity (i.e. whether we see a three-way interaction between plastic surgery status, stimuli attractiveness, and participant justice sensitivity and/or disgust sensitivity)
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