Feeling deprived : sexual objectification increases women's desire for money

Abstract

Sexual objectification occurs when women’s participation in the society is represented merely by their bodies and thus women are deemed as mere tools to meet other’s desires (Bartkey, 1990). Sexual objectification happens frequently in women’s daily lives through media portrayals (e.g. Harper, & Tiggemann, 2008; Harrison & Fredrickson, 2003) and interpersonal encounters (e.g. Calogero, 2004; Tiggemann, & Boundy, 2008). Sexual objectification causes many negative outcomes to women. For example, objectified women suffer from negative emotions (e.g., shame and depression; Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Quinn, Kallen, & Cathey, 2006), impaired intellectual performances (Fredrickson, Roberts, Noll, Quinn, & Twenge, 1998), and decreased well-being and life satisfaction (Breines, Crocker, & Garcia, 2008; Mercurio & Landry, 2008).

In the present investigation, I hypothesized that sexual objectification would lead women to feel that their personal growth and development are deprived which triggers an enhanced desire for financial resources as money. Consistent with my predictions, Study One showed that women’s trait self-objectification correlated positively with their materialism orientation. In Study Two, sexual objectification was manipulated by delivering appearance-related comments to female participants; and women’s desire for money was indexed by their donation intention to a student fund. It was found that sexual objectification increased women’s desire for money by decreasing the amount of money that women were willing to donate. In Study Three, a different paradigm was adopted to induce the feeling of objectification, specifically, participants viewed pictures that depicted women in a sexually objectified way. Then participants’ sense of deprivation as well as desire for money was directly measured to test the hypothesized relationship between objectification, deprivation and money desire. The results showed that women who viewed the pictures of objectified women reported stronger money desire and this effect was mediated by the perceived deprivation of personal growth and development. Study Four replicated the findings of Study Three by using a different paradigm (i.e. recalling past experience of being objectified) to induce the feeling of being objectified and thus provided further evidences for the hypothesized effect. Finally, using the same paradigm of objectification as Study Two, Study Five further substantiated the predicted relationship between sexual objectification, perceived deprivation and women’s money desire by showing that framing objectification experiences as beneficial to women’s personal growth and development was sufficient to remove the effect of sexual objectification on women’s desire for money.

The five studies consistently demonstrated that sexual objectification induces a feeling of being deprived of personal growth and development in women, which further triggers a strong desire for money in women victims. These findings were discussed in terms of their implications on understanding women’s self-perception, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as well as general mental health and well-being.