Does interpersonal attraction to thin media personalities promote eating disorders?

Abstract

A study was conducted to examine the link between college women's interpersonal attraction to female media personalities of various body sizes, and several indices of disordered eating symptomatology. Interpersonal attraction to thin television characters and magazine models, operationalized as a combination of liking, feeling similar to, and wanting to be like these individuals, was expected to be positively related to disordered eating symptomatology. The theoretical proposition that attraction to social agents facilitates modeling of these agents’ behavior was proposed to account for the observed relationships. Attraction to thin media personalities predicted 6 of 7 eating disorder indices, even when exposure to thinness‐depicting and ‐promoting (TDP) media was controlled. The argument is advanced that interpersonal attraction thin media personalities is an important element in the relationship between consumption of TDP media and disordered eating, and exerts an influence on disordered eating beyond the influence of mere media exposure.