Experimental Research On Body Build Stereotype

Implicit stereotype is one of the most important parts of implicit social cognition. It has significant impact upon our daily life. The sub-research areas of the implicit stereotype are expanding from racial stereotype to facial attractiveness stereotype, from gender stereotype to age stereotype. In this research, body build was chosen to be the topic to explore how Chinese people perceived the people of different build. Body build is a factor contributing to the appearance of a person, which has been influencing people all the time. However, it is also changing along the time. The most frequently cited example is the Tang Dynasty which valued the fat figure most. We adopted two different research methods. They are Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Priming Effect.IAT was based on reaction time (RT). It was used in the first experiment to explore if the implicit body build stereotype does exist in three different aspects of daily life. If so, what does it look like?The second experiment is a serial experiment which consists of three sub-experiments. Priming effect was used to probe the developmental trend of the stereotype. The experiment included students from junior high school, senior high school and university. Furthermore, gender was also considered as an independent variable. The research is aiming at finding out if people see those with different gender and different build differently.The research got the following findings: 1. Implicit body build stereotype does exist deep in people's mind. Chinese people tend to associate fatness with positive attributes while thinness to negative attributes. 2. Implicit body build stereotype can be influenced by factors as age, gender, etc. "Trade-off phenomenon on the contribution of consciousness and unconsciousness" also exists in social cognition. The unconsciousness contributes more to the decision of junior high school students. Those from senior high school are more capable of using consciousness to control the way they perceive the environment. College students have already grown up, to whom consciousness and unconsciousness contribute similarly. 3. IAT and Priming Effect were compared in the angle of methodology. Both of them have their own strength and weakness. Only by using these two methods together and considering the results at the same time can we get a closer-to-fact conclusion.