Body esteem: An exception to self-enhancing illusions?

Participants were 192 university students (96 males, 96 females) who comple ted the Body Esteem scale (Franzoi & Shields, 1984) under instructions to r ate their feelings about their own bodies, rate their feelings about a spec ific or "average" student's body, and rate the importance they and others a ttached to these feelings. One of the findings is that when individuals per ceived themselves as less positive on a particular desirable physical trait s they also rated the trait as less important to possess in the first place . The only exception to this was women's weight concern. It was also found that men generally rated themselves higher on body-esteem subscales than th ey rated other men, while women did not exhibit such self-serving evaluatio ns of their bodies. One implication from these results is that the same sel f-enhancement strategies successfully employed by individuals in other area s of self-evaluations were not successful in enhancing one's body esteem, e specially women's weight concern.