Procedure
guilt, anxiety
LENS, BLIND
We invited college women aged 18–25 to take part in a study related to “emotion, body language, and simple mental math.” The study took place at a large, selective, Midwestern university in the U.S. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: control, self-objectification, or male gaze. First, each participant completed a short pre-test on an iPad with measures of state anxiety and guilt. The order of the measures was counterbalanced. Next, the experimenter (always a woman) asked the participant to stand on a specific spot marked with an “X.” Consistent with the cover story suggesting the study was focused on body language, the experimenter explained that the participant would need to stand for the entire math task. In order to ensure that participants paid close attention to the instructions, we asked participants to read the written instructions aloud. Across conditions, the instructions described how the participant would hear a series of math questions given to them by an audio recording and should solve the problems in their head, writing their final answers on a whiteboard provided to them. Additional instructions varied by condition: women in the control condition were instructed to turn the whiteboard and show their final answers to the experimenter, whereas women in the experimental conditions were instructed to show their answers to a video camera. See preregistration materials for full script.The instructions for the experimental conditions described how the participant would be recorded with her face out of frame to keep anonymity, and thus, only her body from the neck down would be recorded. Recording only from the neck down, as in Gay and Castano [In both experimental conditions (self-objectification and male gaze), the viewfinder of the video camera was temporarily turned in the participant’s direction so she could see that her body from the neck down was captured in the camera’s lens. The viewfinder remained in the direction of the participant during the practice problems but was turned back toward the experimenter for the duration of the actual test; no participant could see her image during the working memory task. In the control condition, no video camera was present.In all conditions, participants listened to an audio recording of a woman’s voice dictating an arithmetic problem, solved the problem in their head, and wrote their final answer on a whiteboard. After answering each question, the participant turned the whiteboard in the direction of the experimenter or video camera, depending on condition. The participant pressed a button when she was ready to hear the next question and repeated this procedure for all twenty questions. Participants were encouraged to do the problems as quickly and accurately as possible. The experimenter recorded the number of correct responses. To determine how long each participant took to answer all twenty questions, an audio recording was taken in the control condition using an iPad. These audio recordings and the audio from the videos taken in experimental conditions were reviewed after the study. Two independent raters, blind to condition, used only the audio of these recordings to determine the total time from hearing the first question to answering the final question.Once the working memory task was completed, participants were invited once again to sit down and were given the post-test survey on an iPad. This survey included the measures of state anxiety and guilt, as well as measures of state body surveillance and body satisfaction. The order of the measures was counterbalanced. Participants then provided basic demographic information and were asked to guess the hypothesis and purpose of the study. Finally, experimenters fully debriefed participants of all deception and explained the true purpose of the study.