When the East Meets the West: An Examination of Third-Person Perceptions About Idealized Body Image in Singapore

This study found that, consistent with their counterparts in the United States, college women in Singapore reported a third-person perception when they were asked to evaluate possible effects of idealized body image portrayed in advertisements. The self-friend disparity of perceived media effects, although transcultural, is contingent on a few factors. These factors include the social distance between a perceiver and the comparison group, the perceiver's self-evaluated thinness, and the perceiver's perception of the benefit likelihood of media effects. The analyses of this study also show that a perceiver's perception of the social desirability of media portrayals differs conceptually from the same perceiver's perception of the benefit likelihood of media effects.