Implications and future directions
Media, fatigue
MINOR
The present study is distinct from previous work on this topic due to our focus on statistical power and preregistration. Scholars have recently argued that a large proportion of the findings in psychology literature are “false positives” resulting from underpowered studies and a bias toward reporting only statistically significant findings [Though null results from a single study should never be interpreted as overturning an existing body of literature, the preregistration and high level of statistical power for the current study suggest these results should at least leave researchers open to considering the extent to which findings concerning objectification’s impact on women’s cognitive performance are broad or replicable. It is possible that the effect size of objectification’s influence on women’s performance is inflated in the current literature and that the effect was too small to detect even with the large sample we employed. However, recognizing that published effect sizes may be inflated [In the future, similarly well-powered studies should continue to investigate whether there is an effect of objectifying environments on women’s cognitive performance and if so, which types of cognitive tasks are affected. Self-objectification may disrupt certain types of cognitive processes more than others. The dependent variables employed in the current literature include a wide array of cognitive tests and tasks. It seems likely that the choice of dependent variable could have a large impact on the ability to detect effects of objectification on women’s cognitive performance. Future work should focus on selecting dependent variables that are theoretically driven (i.e., cognitive tasks likely to be disrupted by body monitoring) and are sensitive to even minor increases in working memory load. As noted above, the ability to control for individual-level differences likely to affect performance would also be ideal.Since the current study was conducted, the need for realistic and robust research in this area has only grown. Preliminary evidence suggests links between appearance concern and fatigue due to video conferencing [Work in this area thus far has focused on how relatively small objectification manipulations can have large, negative impacts on women. However, publication bias for statistically significant findings and the tendency of underpowered studies to produce inflated effect sizes could suggest that the effect of objectification’s impact on women’s cognitive performance may be overstated. Theory and empirical evidence alike suggest that objectification is an everyday experience for women [Thank you to Northwestern’s Body and Media Lab for assistance with data collection.