Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013) 14831489

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Computers in Human Behavior

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh

Women on display: The effect of portraying the self online on

womens self-objectication
Dian A. de Vries , Jochen Peter
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Available online 5 March 2013
Keywords:
Self-objectication
Online self-portrayal
Objectication
Social network sites

a b s t r a c t
Objectication research has largely ignored the potential impact of Internet activities, such as online selfportrayal, on womens self-objectication and whether this may interact with traditional sexually objectifying stimuli. In response to these research gaps, the present study had two goals: rst, to investigate if
portraying the self to others online leads to self-objectication in women; second, to test whether priming with sexually objectifying content from traditional media moderates the effect of online self-portrayal on self-objectication. We conducted an online experiment with a two (priming stimuli:
objectifying vs. neutral) by two (audience: online audience vs. no audience) between subjects design
among 221 women aged 1825. All participants created an online prole, which consisted of choosing
an avatar and writing a self-description. As expected, participants in the online audience condition
self-objectied more strongly than did participants in the no audience condition. However, this effect
only held among those who had been primed with sexually objectifying stimuli. Our results suggest that
womens online self-portrayal, if combined with sexually objectifying stimuli, may lead to selfobjectication.
2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Girls and women frequently experience objectication, meaning they are valued predominantly in terms of their physical and
sexual attractiveness (Calogero, Tantleff-Dunn, & Thompson,
2011; Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). In daily life, such objectifying
treatment is experienced by women during objectifying social
interactions, which on average, female students in the United
States (US) encounter more than once a week, three times more
frequently than male students (Swim, Hyers, Cohen, & Ferguson,
2001). At the same time, objectifying content is pervasive in popular Western media. Women, and to a lesser extent also men, are depicted with a strong focus on their physical attractiveness in
magazines, television, music videos, and other media (American
Psychological Association, 2007; Calogero et al., 2011).
Evidence has accumulated that being objectied or viewing
objectication of women in the media may lead individuals to
self-objectify (for a review, see Moradi & Huang, 2008). Selfobjectication entails that individuals start to view themselves
as a body and focus on their physical appearance rather than
on what they can do or how they feel (Fredrickson & Roberts,
1997). Viewing the self in such a way can have serious negative
consequences for a persons wellbeing, as research has linked
self-objectication with increased body shame, anxiety, and
Corresponding author. Tel.: +31 (0)20 525 2171; fax: +31 (0)20 525 3681.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (D.A. de Vries), [email protected] (J. Peter).
0747-5632/$ - see front matter 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.01.015

various mental and physical health problems, at least among women (as reviewed in Moradi & Huang, 2008; Tiggemann, 2011).
The link between objectifying social interactions and media content on the one hand and self-objectication on the other has been
supported by a large body of research (Moradi & Huang, 2008). However, existing research has been limited almost exclusively to faceto-face interactions and traditional media, notably magazines and
television (Aubrey, 2006a; Morry & Staska, 2001). This is surprising
because, over the past years, the Internet has become a popular venue for social interaction and a medium in its own right (DiMaggio,
Hargittai, Neuman, & Robinson, 2001). Internet users possibilities to
interact online and to generate content have multiplied (Castells,
2007). Moreover, scholars have observed a rise of a new form of
socialized communication: mass self-communication (Castells,
2007, p. 248), which is characterized by users generating and distributing media content themselves. This digital turn in how people
interact and how media content is generated also forces us to extend
our notion on the antecedents of self-objectication.
Of crucial importance in this context is the popular activity of
creating and sharing self-related content online, such as keeping
a personal prole on a social network site (SNS). To our knowledge, the only published study investigating the potential role of
mass self-communication in self-objectication has shown that
adolescent girls who spend more time using SNS report higher
levels of self-objectication (Vandenbosch & Eggermont, 2012).
However, it is unclear whether SNS use causes self-objectication, and if so, which features of SNS use may evoke this effect.

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D.A. de Vries, J. Peter / Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013) 14831489

One aspect of SNS use that may at least partly account for the
correlation found between SNS use and self-objectication is
that people typically portray themselves to a relatively large
number of people when they portray themselves online (Krmer
& Winter, 2008). Research on ofine self-portrayal suggests that
when individuals portray themselves to others, they can become
preoccupied with how other people will judge them and their
looks (Leary & Kowalski, 1990). In this way, portraying the self
to others online may lead to self-objectication. It is the rst
aim of this study to test this.
A focus on whether self-generated Internet content in general
and online self-portrayal in particular leads to self-objectication
also raises important questions about the conceptualization of traditional media in the etiology of self-objectication. At least
implicitly, existing objectication research is based on the assumption that objectifying content, such as scantily dressed models in
advertisements or on magazine covers, affects self-objectication
and related constructs in a cumulative, but largely independent
way (e.g., Aubrey, 2006a, 2006b, 2010; Aubrey, Henson, Hopper,
& Smith, 2009; Grabe, Ward, & Hyde, 2008; Harper & Tiggemann,
2008; Morry & Staska, 2001). However, when presenting the self
online, traditional objectifying content may very well present a
condition that boosts the potential effect of online self-portrayal
on self-objectication, for example by making objectifying ideas
more cognitively accessible. In that case, exposure to traditional
objectifying content interacts with online self-portrayal in its effect
on self-objectication. Consequently, traditional objectifying content would have to be conceptualized as a moderator in the etiology of self-objectication. It is, therefore, the second goal of this
study to test initially whether traditional objectifying content
moderates the effect of online self-portrayal on self-objectication.
The current study initially tests the effect of online self-portrayal and the possible moderating role of objectifying media content on self-objectication among women. Although men are also
subjected to objectifying experiences, women experience objectication more frequently than men, both in the media (American
Psychological Association, 2007) and in interpersonal situations
(Swim et al., 2001). These gender differences also surface on SNS,
where girls are evaluated more strongly on the basis of their physical appearance than boys (Manago, Graham, Greeneld, & Salimkhan, 2008). Possibly as a result of being objectied more frequently
on SNS, girls have been found to generally pay more attention than
boys to a favorable outer appearance on SNS (Pempek, Yermolayeva, & Calvert, 2009; Siibak, 2009). An effect of online self-portrayal on self-objectication is thus likely to occur among
women. As a rst approach to the issue, we therefore decided to
explore this relation only among women.

2. Objectication online
In its focus on media coverage as an antecedent of self-objectication and related constructs, objectication research has typically operated in a traditional media effects paradigm (for a
review, see Grabe et al., 2008). Consequently, objectication research has largely dealt with the question of whether the reception
of objectifying content that was created by others causes selfobjectication in women (e.g., Aubrey, 2006a, 2006b; Aubrey
et al., 2009; Harper & Tiggemann, 2008; Morry & Staska, 2001).
The Internet has increasingly been questioning this reception-oriented perspective as Internet users not only receive information,
but also distribute or even create information themselves (Castells,
2007; Dominick, 1999). As a consequence, it is striking that the
reception-oriented perspective in objectication research has not
yet been supplemented by a creation-oriented perspective. More
specically, it is surprising that it has rarely been asked whether

the creation of content by women themselves causes self-objectication in these same women.
In the context of the online creation of content and its implications for the self-objectication process, online self-portrayal may
play a particularly important role. Firstly, how one portrays the self
to others inuences how people view themselves (Schlenker, Dlugolecki, & Doherty, 1994). Secondly, self-portrayal is one of the most
popular online activities, especially among adolescents and young
adults (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010). The Internet offers
many opportunities for self-portrayal. For instance, users can upload
and share personal photos on photo archive sites, such as Flickr, upload videos to video archive sites, such as YouTube (e.g., youtube.com), and write texts about their lives on blogs. However, the
most popular form of online self-portrayal currently occurs on social
network sites (SNSs) (Lenhart et al., 2010). On SNS, users portray
themselves through online proles. These proles usually include
textual information about the user, as well as selfrelated visual
content, for example photos and videos (boyd, 2008). In addition,
users view and comment on each others self-portrayals on SNS
(boyd, 2008). In this way, SNS enable users to create self-related content, convey it to an online audience, and receive feedback.
Portraying the self to others is not a new phenomenon in itself
and has, in its face-to-face, ofine version, been researched
extensively (for overviews see Leary & Kowalski, 1990; Schlenker
& Pontari, 2000). However, online self-portrayal differs from offline, face-to-face self-portrayal in at least three ways. Firstly, in
stark contrast to ofine, face-to-face self-portrayals, online selfportrayals are persistent and visible to others relatively long after
they have been created or modied (boyd, 2008). Secondly, online
self-portrayals are characterized by reduced audio-visual cues
compared to face-to-face interactions (Valkenburg & Peter, 2011;
Walther, 1996), which gives the creator of an online self-portrayal
more control over the self-portrayal. Thirdly, and most importantly
in the context of the present study, most online self-portrayals are
characterized by their easy accessibility to others (Valkenburg &
Peter, 2011). On SNS for example, some proles are publically
accessible to everyone, while other proles are visible only to identied contacts (boyd, 2008). However, users of SNS have on average between 151 and 200 identied contacts who can access
their self-portrayals (Jacobsen & Forste, 2011). In addition, online
self-portrayals can be easily distributed to others who were not given access (boyd, 2008). As a result, even online self-portrayals
with limited access can be seen by unknown others and, in contrast
to ofine self-portrayals, the creator of an online self-portrayal will
never know exactly who will see the self-portrayal, thus presenting
the self to an unspecic audience (boyd, 2008).
The accessibility of online self-portrayals to others, and notably
the unspecic character of the audience of online self-portrayals,
has consequences for how women portray themselves online and,
eventually, for the extent to which they self-objectify. Of pivotal
importance in this respect are peoples assumptions regarding the
values and preferences of their audience (Leary & Kowalski, 1990).
According to objectication theory, girls learn in their socialization
that their physical appearance is a key dimension in which they
are evaluated by others (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). The dominant
role of physical appearance for girls and womens evaluation also
surfaces in online settings. Studies have shown that when girls
and women portray themselves online, such as on SNS, they are
strongly evaluated based on their physical appearance. For example,
comments on SNS in response to online self-portrayals of girls frequently include remarks about the physical attractiveness of the girl
portrayed (Ringrose, 2011). Furthermore, Internet users are more
likely to accept a woman into their online social network if she is
physically attractive (Wang, Moon, Kwon, Evans, & Stefanone,
2010). As a result, when girls and women portray themselves online,
such as on SNS, they expect that their body and looks will be assessed

D.A. de Vries, J. Peter / Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013) 14831489

and commented upon, and that they will be judged at least partly
based on their physical appearance (Siibak, 2009).
Womens anticipation of others evaluating them based on their
physical appearance plays an important role in self-objectication.
In line with objectication theory, research has shown that when
women expect to be evaluated based on their physical appearance,
they focus on their appearance (Calogero, 2004) and try to improve
their bodies and looks (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). These two
manifestations of self-objectication an increased focus on ones
physical appearance and the attempt to improve how ones body
looks to others may also occur when women portray themselves
online. As described before, women and girls expect to be evaluated based on their appearance when they portray themselves to
an online audience (Ringrose, 2011; Siibak, 2009). Women and
girls may thus also increasingly focus on their appearance and
try to enhance the presentation of their bodies and looks online.
According to objectication theory, it is consequently likely that
portraying the self to an online audience increases self-objectication among women. Our rst hypothesis reads:
H1. If women portray themselves to an online audience, they will
self-objectify to a greater extent relative to women who do not
portray themselves to an online audience.

3. The moderating role of objectifying media

Living in media-saturated environments, women in rich Western countries are often confronted with objectifying content,
which occurs in all types of media, including print advertisements,
music videos and prime time television (American Psychological
Association, 2007; Calogero et al., 2011). Traditionally, objectication research has conceptualized objectifying content as a direct
inuence on womens self-objectication (e.g., Aubrey, 2006a,
2006b, 2010; Aubrey et al., 2009; Grabe et al., 2008; Harper & Tiggemann, 2008; Morry & Staska, 2001). In the context of the present
study, with its focus on the impact of womens self-portrayal to an
online audience on self-objectication, objectifying media content
may also be conceptualized as a moderator of this effect. One possible rationale for this conceptualization comes from media priming theory (Roskos-Ewoldsen, Roskos-Ewoldsen, & Carpentier,
2009). Media priming theory states that a media stimulus renders
particular cognitions temporarily more accessible in individuals
minds. If these individuals subsequently deal with a situation to
which the temporarily accessible cognitions are applicable, they
are more likely to interpret this situation in the light of these cognitions. The priming media stimulus thus presents a condition for
the particular interpretation of the subsequently encountered
information.
In objectication research, objectifying media images are assumed to convey the message that physical attractiveness is
important for women and that women are judged based on their
physical appearance (Aubrey et al., 2009). Thus, priming with
objectifying stimuli likely activates cognitions about the importance for women to look physically attractive and about evaluations based on their physical attractiveness. When women
subsequently portray themselves to others online, the activation
of these cognitions may increase womens expectation that their
audience will judge them based on their appearance. This increased expectation of being evaluated based on appearance in
turn will increase self-objectication. Therefore, we hypothesize:
H2. The hypothesized effect that portraying the self to others
online increases self-objectication (see H1) is stronger if women
have been primed with objectifying stimuli compared to when
they have not.

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4. Method
We conducted a web-based experiment with a two (priming
stimuli: objectifying vs. neutral) by two (audience: online audience
vs. no audience) between-subjects design. We opted for a
web-based experiment so that participants could complete the
experiment from the privacy of their own home. A web-based
experiment increases participants anonymity and diminishes
biases resulting from a lab environment, such as interaction with
an experimenter, which may affect self-portrayals. Furthermore,
a web-based approach meant that we were able to reach participants from different parts of the Netherlands, resulting in greater
generalizability of the ndings. These benets were believed to
outweigh the disadvantage of a lack of experimental control for
the current experiment (Reips, 2000). Another known disadvantage of web-experiments, namely the risk of multiple submissions
by the same participant, was not expected to be a problem, as we
did not allow multiple entries from the same IP-address.
4.1. Participants and procedure
Two-hundred-and-twenty-one women aged 1825 participated
in the web-based experiment. As a result, there was sufcient
power (.80) to detect a medium effect size at a signicance level
of .05 (Cohen, 1992), which previous research has shown to be a
reasonable effect size to expect (Aubrey et al., 2009). The mean
age of the participants was 20.8 years (SD = 2.2). BMI ranged from
17.4 (underweight) to 38.0 (obese) (M = 22.0, SD = 2.7). Most of the
participants were students of higher education (89.6%) and the
remainder was high-school student (0.9%) or employed (9.5%).
The sample predominantly consisted of women born in the Netherlands (95.5%) and had parents who were also born in the Netherlands (mother 91.0%, father 89.1%).
Permission for the procedure of this study was granted by the
departmental ethical committee. Participants could participate by
following a link to the experiment, which was programmed with
the survey tool Qualtrics. Participants were recruited in two ways.
First, we placed an ad on the student webpage. Students could participate in exchange for course credits. Second, we recruited participants via snowball sampling using e-mail and Facebook. These
participants participated in exchange for a chance to win one of
three gift-vouchers (2  25 Euro; 1  50 Euro) in a lottery.
To prevent response bias, we constructed a cover story similar
to a cover story that has successfully been used in previous research (Halliwell & Dittmar, 2004). Participants were told that
the study aim was to investigate womens consumer choices. Upon
consent, participants were randomly assigned to one of the two
priming stimuli conditions, and viewed and rated either two neutral advertisements or two objectifying advertisements. Next, participants were randomly assigned to one of the two audience
conditions. Subsequently, participants created an online prole,
after which they lled out their demographic information. Finally,
participants were probed for suspicion of the aims of the study.
None of the participants guessed the study aims. Participants were
then thanked for their participation and asked to ll in their contact information on a separate screen. Participants were notied
that their contact information was not linked to their answers
and was only meant for debrieng them, giving them course credits and informing them about the rafe.
4.1.1. Priming stimuli
The stimulus material for the priming stimuli conditions consisted of two neutral advertisements and two objectifying advertisements. For this purpose, four perfume advertisements for the
ctional perfume brands Blue and Pink were created. Objecti-

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D.A. de Vries, J. Peter / Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013) 14831489

fying media content is generally operationalized by featuring a female with a high degree of skin exposure (e.g., Aubrey, 2010; Reichert, Lambiase, Morgan, Carstarphen, & Zavoina, 1999). Previous
research has shown that pictures of a woman in lingerie are a valid
method to operationalize objectication of women (Aubrey et al.,
2009). Therefore, the objectifying advertisements contained a woman in lingerie. The neutral advertisements did not display any
persons, but instead contained a larger version of the perfume bottle to prevent a large empty space, which would look articial. In
addition, the advertisements contained a background with a landscape and the name of the ctional perfume. Perfume advertisements were chosen because they are targeted at women and
frequently display women in an objectifying way. The advertisements were ctional, rstly to prevent effects of brand or advertisement familiarity and attitudes, and secondly to ensure that
the neutral and objectifying advertisements could be made identical in every way except the objectifying features.
Participants were asked to rate on a ve point scale (1 = totally
disagree and 5 = totally agree) how much they agreed with two
statements regarding each advertisement. The rst statement
was The advertisement was interesting and the second was
The advertisement was attractive. These two statements were
used to boost the cover story and to check if the advertisements
were comparable. The average score for each advertisement was
between 2.1 (SD = 0.8) and 2.6 (SD = 0.9) for interestingness and
between 2.5 (SD = 0.9) and 3.0 (SD = 1.0) for attractiveness. This
suggests that the advertisements were found to be attractive nor
unattractive and more uninteresting than interesting. There were
no signicant differences between the neutral and objectifying
stimuli in terms of how attractive, t(219) = 0.05, p = .957, or how
interesting they were found to be, t(219) = 0.19, p = .846.
4.1.2. Audience conditions
Participants were randomly assigned to an online audience condition or a no audience condition. In both conditions, participants
were instructed to make a prole, which implied writing a
self-description of ve sentences and choosing hair and skin color,
body-size and clothing for a personal avatar. By having the participants describe themselves and choose an avatar, we tried to operationalize the combination of text and imagery on SNS member
proles. The crucial difference between the two conditions was
the accessibility of the self-portrayals because we expected this
characteristic of online self-portrayals to affect self-objectication.
To manipulate accessibility of the self-portrayals, participants in
the no audience condition were told that nobody would see their
prole, while participants in the online audience condition were
led to believe that their self-portrayals would be visible to others.
More specically, participants in the online audience condition
were told that their prole would be shown to other participants
and that they may interact with these persons in a follow-up webcam study. In this way, it remained unspecic to the participants in
the online audience condition who would see their prole, which
simulated online self-portrayal as it occurs on SNS. We chose a
no audience condition, rather than a face-to-face condition, to keep
constant other factors that may affect self-portrayal and that
distinguish online from ofine, face-to-face self-portrayal, such as
reduced visual and auditory cues and the persistence of the selfportrayal.
4.2. Measures
4.2.1. Self-objectication
Self-objectication was operationalized as the degree to which
womens self-descriptions emphasized their physical attractiveness. Two independent coders rated how many of the ve sentences of the self-descriptions directly or indirectly lead the

audience to infer that the participant is physically attractive,

which included statements such as I am beautiful and sentences
regarding working out and interest in cosmetics and fashion.
All participants wrote exactly ve sentences about the self. If a
self-descriptive sentence contained multiple elements, only the
rst element was coded to ensure relative measurement of selfobjectication, that is, the proportion of the total self-descriptive
statements which is self-objectifying. This measure is similar to
the Twenty Statements Test (TST) (Fredrickson, Roberts, Noll,
Quinn, & Twenge, 1998), which is shown to be reliable and responsive to experimental inductions of self-objectication (Aubrey
et al., 2009; Calogero, 2011). Interrater agreement was high
(j = .91) (Landis & Koch, 1977).
4.2.2. Demographic variables
Information was collected regarding age, height and weight (to
calculate BMI), relationship status (in a relationship or not), occupation (in school, student, working, or none of the above), country
of birth, as well as country of birth of mother and father.
5. Results
5.1. Randomization check
Before testing the hypotheses, we examined whether there
were any differences between the four conditions in participants
background characteristics. Chi-square analyses showed that the
four conditions did not differ signicantly with regard to occupation, v2(6, N = 221) = 4.46, p = .615, relationship status, v2(3,
N = 220) = 5.72, p = .126, place of birth, v2(3, N = 221) = 2.65,
p = .449, birthplace of mother, v2(3, N = 221) = 2.05, p = .561, or
birthplace of father, v2(3, N = 221) = 1.07, p = .786. Univariate analyses of variance (ANOVA) showed no signicant differences between the four conditions with regard to BMI, F(3,216) = .09,
p = .965, or age, F(3,217) = .35, p = .788. Overall, the randomization
was successful.
5.2. Hypotheses testing
To test the hypotheses, two (audience: online audience vs. no
audience) by two (priming stimuli: objectifying vs. neutral) between-subjects factorial analyses of variance were conducted on
the outcome variable self-objectication. The rst hypothesis predicted that if women portrayed themselves to others online, they
would self-objectify to a greater extent relative to women who
did not portray themselves to an online audience. The second
hypothesis predicted that the effect of portraying the self to others
online on self-objectication would be stronger if women had been
primed with objectifying stimuli compared to when they had not.
We therefore focused rst on the interaction effect between priming stimuli condition and audience condition on self-objectication. This interaction was signicant, F(1, 217) = 4.34, p = .037.
Therefore, we conducted follow-up simple slope analyses to test
the differences between the audience conditions separately for
the priming stimuli conditions. As visualized in Fig. 1, results
showed that among participants in the objectifying priming stimuli condition, women who portrayed themselves to an online audience wrote more statements emphasizing their physical
attractiveness in their self-description (M = 0.59, SD = 0.73) than
women who portrayed themselves privately (M = 0.24, SD = 0.51).
This difference was signicant F(1, 218) = 9.55, p = .002. In contrast, among participants in the neutral priming condition the
self-descriptions of women who portrayed themselves to an online
audience did not contain signicantly more or less statements
which emphasized physical appearance (M = 0.37, SD = 0.53) than

D.A. de Vries, J. Peter / Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013) 14831489

Fig. 1. Mean number of statements in self-description emphasizing the participants physical attractiveness by audience condition and priming stimuli condition.
Condence intervals (95%) are represented in the gure by the error bars attached
to each column.

the self-descriptions of women who portrayed themselves privately (M = 0.36, SD = 0.60), F(1, 218) = 0.02, p = .875. Portraying
the self online thus only lead to self-objectication among participants who had been primed with objectifying stimuli and not
among participants who had been primed with neutral stimuli.
Hypothesis 2 was thus supported.
6. Discussion
Existing research on media as an antecedent of self-objectication has largely focused on how traditional objectifying material
affects womens self-objectication (Aubrey, 2006a, 2006b, 2010;
Aubrey et al., 2009; Grabe et al., 2008; Harper & Tiggemann,
2008; Morry & Staska, 2001). This study is one of the rst to investigate whether womens online activities may cause self-objectication. Specically, we were interested in whether portraying the
self to others through an online prole would increase self-objectication and whether this effect would be boosted by objectifying
content in an advertisement. We found that portraying the self to
others online increased self-objectication in young women, notably after they had been primed with objectifying media content
from a perfume ad. This study makes several theoretical contributions to objectication research, while also having practical implications for self-objectication as a societal phenomenon.
6.1. Contributions to objectication research
The present study contributes to objectication research in at
least two ways. First, the study extends our knowledge about the
etiology of self-objectication. Previous research has shown that
womens self-objectication increases when they encounter objectifying information in the media (Aubrey, 2006a, 2006b, 2010; Aubrey et al., 2009; Grabe et al., 2008; Harper & Tiggemann, 2008;
Morry & Staska, 2001). The dominant reception-oriented
perspective in this research has produced consistent results and
has its theoretical merits, but is somewhat oblivious of recent

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developments in womens media environment, notably the proliferation of mass self-communication (Castells, 2007). Therefore, our
study has supplemented the reception-oriented perspective of earlier research with a creation-oriented perspective. This change of
perspective has enabled us to demonstrate that not only the reception of mediated content, but also the creation of it, can lead women to self-objectify, at least when this content is personal and
self-related and can be viewed by others. To paraphrase a wellknown line in communication research, for a better understanding
of self-objectication we need to know both what media users do
with the media and what media do with them.
A second, related contribution of our study to objectication
theory concerns the conceptualization of conditional media effects
on self-objectication. At least implicitly, objectication research
has assumed that objectifying content from different media cumulates in its impact on self-objectication, but affects self-objectication independently from each other. However, as women in
rich Western societies live in a media-saturated environment with
abundant objectifying content (American Psychological Association, 2007; Calogero et al., 2011) it makes sense to also consider
the possibility that different media activities may interact with
each other. This interactive perspective seems particularly interesting when two related activities, such as the creation of an online
self-portrayal and the viewing of a objectifying advertisement,
occur in close temporal order. Our results show that objectifying
content may present a condition in which the effect of online
self-portrayal on self-objectication may be boosted. Given the
increasing possibilities of online self-portrayal and the abundance
of objectifying media content, it may be important to further look
into the moderating role of objectifying content in the emergence
of self-objectication.
6.2. Implications for self-objectication as a societal phenomenon
In addition to its contributions at a theoretical level, the current
study also has implications for self-objectication in modern society in which mass self-communication is common (Castells, 2007).
Online self-portrayal is a particularly popular form of mass selfcommunication, especially among young people (Lenhart et al.,
2010). A majority of adolescents and young adults keep a prole
on a social network site (Lenhart et al., 2010) and on average spend
around 50 min a day on these websites (Jacobsen & Forste, 2011).
Research suggests that online communication increasingly complements ofine communication, which means that women today
will create and share more self-related content than did women of
previous generations. Our ndings tentatively point to the possibility that the opportunity and rise of online self-portrayal may result
in an increase of womens self-objectication as a societal phenomenon, notably when it occurs in combination with exposure
to traditional objectifying media content. Needless to say, this
hypothesis awaits rigorous testing with longitudinal survey
studies.
Girls and women today are also exposed to more objectifying
content than women of previous generations (American Psychological Association, 2007; Reichert et al., 1999). As the level of
exposure to objectifying media has been shown to positively predict self-objectication (Aubrey, 2006a, 2006b), the increased pervasiveness of objectifying media content may lead to an increase of
self-objectication among women. The current study has shown
that objectifying media content enhances self-objectication when
it precedes online self-portrayal and possibly also other situations
in which women may expect to be evaluated based on their
appearance. As a result, the fact that young women frequently
encounter objectifying content while they are using social network
sites (Zhong, Hardin, & Sun, 2011) may have implications for the
incidence of self-objectication. Specically the placement of

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D.A. de Vries, J. Peter / Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013) 14831489

objectifying advertisements on SNS, which for instance occurs on

popular SNS Facebook, may increase the occurrence of self-objectication and deserves our attention. However, also this hypothesis
should be subjected to rigorous testing before drawing any
conclusions.
6.3. Limitations and future directions
The current research has identied one particular Internet
activity which plays a role in the self-objectication process,
namely online self-portrayal. However, there may be other Internet
activities that may also impact self-objectication. For example,
the time spent on SNS is not only used to portray the self, but also
to view the self-portrayals of contacts (boyd, 2008). As a result,
women may witness other women being judged based on their
appearance, for instance through public comments on these
womens online proles. These comments may contribute to
self-objectication in various ways, for example through rendering
cognitions about appearance as an evaluation standard more
accessible, which may affect subsequent self-portrayal, or even
by making witnesses of such comments regard themselves through
the eyes of the commentators.
In the current study, we investigated and manipulated one feature of online self-portrayals, namely their accessibility to others.
However, there are several other characteristics that accompany
the accessibility of online self-portrayals, notably the size and
composition of the audience. Depending on womens perception
of how big their audience is and who may see their self-portrayal,
women may vary in their self-objectication. Moreover, two features of online self-portrayals, namely their reduced cues and their
persistence compared to ofine self-portrayals, are important
concepts that may affect the inuence of online self-portrayal on
self-objectication. For example, the possibility to include (audio)
visual cues in a self-portrayal may inuence the extent to which
women self-objectify, with enhanced possibilities to include such
cues probably increasing self-objectication. Similarly, relatively
persistent self-portrayals, as those on SNS, may increase self-objectication more strongly than those that are less persistent such as
on Instant Messaging. Research into the effects of different features
of online self-portrayal on self-objectication may help predict and
explain the roles of the many different and continuously changing
forms of communication (e.g., Facebook, Instant Messaging, Twitter, Skype and Instagram) in the self-objectication process.
The current study assumed that womens expectations of being
evaluated based on their appearance may explain why online selfportrayal leads to self-objectication after being primed with
objectifying content. This assumption is in line with previous research regarding the online self-portrayal of girls and women
(Ringrose, 2011; Siibak, 2009), and ts within the framework of
objectication theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Still, our
study does not rigorously demonstrate that the expectation to be
evaluated based on ones appearance underlies the effect we found.
Therefore, a formal test of the theorized mediating process is necessary for a more complete understanding of the effect of online
self-portrayal on self-objectication. Another limitation of this
study is that participants on average only wrote 0.4 statements
which emphasized their physical attractiveness, which constituted
eight percent of the total self-description. However, the rate of
appearance related statements in womens self-descriptions is in
line with the average (7.5%) found by Aubrey et al. (2009) when
studying media priming effects on self-objectication using the
well-known Twenty Statements Test (Fredrickson et al., 1998).
The current study was conducted among a sample which consisted predominantly of Dutch students and only included women.
Therefore we lacked statistical power to test if ethnicity moderated
our results and cannot conclude how online self-portrayal may af-

fect men. Most studies show that women of all ethnicities report
higher trait self-objectication than men (Moradi, 2010), which
is in line with the original tenet of self-objectication theory that
women are objectied more frequently than men (Fredrickson &
Roberts, 1997). However, there is evidence that men also experience self-objectication in response to some objectifying situations
(Moradi, 2010). In addition, ethnicity may inuence the degree to
which certain situations lead to self-objectication (Moradi,
2010). As a result, we cannot generalize our ndings to other
groups in terms of gender, ethnicity and possibly other personal
characteristics. Therefore, addressing gender and cultural diversity
is an important venue for further research into the effects of SNS on
self-objectication. Finally, the current study only focused on a
short-term manifestation of self-objectication. To understand
the role of online self-portrayal and broader Internet use in selfobjectication among women more thoroughly, long-term effect
studies are necessary.
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