No Evidence That Exposure to Materialistic Advertisements Influence Appearance Overvaluation and Financial Success Overvaluation in the Self-concept
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Theory and prior research indicate that placing overriding importance on a life domain (e.g., appearance, financial success, health, work, interpersonal relationships) can negatively influence mental and physical health. In particular, people who overvalue appearance have been shown to engage in maladaptive weight-control behaviours and to have eating disorders. Likewise, people who overvalue financial success have been shown to engage in risky gambling and to have disordered gambling. Although the consequences of overvaluing a life domain are palpable, much less is known about its antecedents, which we examined in the current research. According to the Consumer Culture Impact Model, exposure to sociocultural ideals regarding luxury, wealth, and appearance via advertisements influence appearance overvaluation. We proposed that exposure to such sociocultural ideals should also influence financial success overvaluation. We tested the hypothesis that appearance and financial success overvaluation increase in response to viewing materialistic advertisements. First and second year undergraduate students completed self-report measures of appearance and financial success overvaluation in September 2020 (N = 185). They were re-contacted in March 2021 to complete a consumer decision making task. In the task, participants were randomly assigned to a control condition wherein they viewed and compared several non-materialistic advertisements (e.g., pencils, coffee) or to an experimental condition wherein they viewed and compared materialistic advertisements (e.g., champagne, luxury vacation). Afterwards, all participants completed again the same measures of overvaluation. Unexpectedly, linear regression analyses showed that there were no pre-post changes in appearance and financial success overvaluation from before to after exposure to materialistic (relative to non-materialistic) advertisements. Exploratory Bayesian regression analyses revealed support for the null hypothesis. Findings do not support the Consumer Culture Impact Model. Holding materialistic values are discussed as a potential moderator.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".