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The Effect of Sexual Objectification on Dishonesty

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Abstract

In daily life, women often experience various forms of sexual objectification such as being stared at in public settings and receiving unsolicited sexual remarks on social media. These incidents could have damaging effects on women’s physical and mental health, necessitating ways to respond to the experience. Researchers have provided burgeoning evidence demonstrating the effects of sexual objectification on various psychological, emotional, and cognitive outcomes. However, relatively few researchers have tested how sexually objectified people behaviorally react to the objectification experience. To address this knowledge gap, we aimed to test whether sexual objectification increases dishonesty among women and reveal one potential underlying psychological mechanism. We predicted that sexual objectification increases dishonesty serially through higher levels of relative deprivation and lower levels of self-regulation. We conducted two experiments (valid N = 150 and 279, respectively) to test the predictions and found that participants who experienced sexual objectification reported greater dishonest tendencies than those who did not (Experiments 1 and 2). Moreover, relative deprivation and self-regulation serially mediated the effect of sexual objectification on dishonesty (Experiment 2). In the current experiments, we highlight the essential role of relative deprivation and self-regulation in explaining how sexual objectification increases dishonesty and various related forms of antisocial behavior.

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Notes

  1. We conducted an additional simple mediation analysis (Model 4; Hayes, 2013) to examine whether self-regulation mediated the effect of sexual objectification on dishonesty. The results showed that this simple mediation model could explain 7.73% of variance in dishonesty. Moreover, a significant simple mediation effect through self-regulation was found because the 95% CI did not include zero (0.02 to 0.10). The results revealed that the serial mediation model reported in the main document could explain more variance in dishonesty than the simple mediation model could.

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Funding

This research was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council’s General Research Fund (18611121) and the Education University of Hong Kong’s Departmental Research Grant (E0475).

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Correspondence to Kai-Tak Poon.

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The authors declare that they have no potential conflicts of interest.

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The research was conducted in accord with APA ethical standards. Ethical approval from the Institutional Review Board of the authors’ university was obtained.

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Poon, KT., Lai, HS. & Chan, R.S.W. The Effect of Sexual Objectification on Dishonesty. Arch Sex Behav 52, 1617–1629 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02560-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02560-3

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