This social conditioning, in turn, leads girls and boys to develop different attitudes toward sex and sexual stimuli Griffitt and Kaiser, Although men on average hold more positive attitudes toward sex than women do, some women are more positive than others are. Such intragender variation may stem from differences in women's childhood experiences, material resources, physical attractiveness, etc. Sengupta and Dahl, Intragender variation also exists for men, but empirical evidence suggests that this variation is more pronounced for women Lippa, The findings reviewed above occurred in a situation where participants' cognitive processing was constrained.
Under this condition, the relevance of the sexual content or the lack of it is unlikely to play a part in the judgment Dahl et al. Because irrelevancy is simply less of an issue when the sexual content and the advertised product are connected, attitudes toward ads with such connected sexual content should be relatively positive even if processing is unconstrained.
What about when processing is unconstrained and the sexual content is perceived to be connected to the advertised product? Are ads always effective when the sexual content appears in relation to products like sun lotions, underwear, or hygiene items, or are attitudes different between men and women and across commitment conditions?
Men and women are likely to differ in their attitudes toward ads featuring relevant sexual content when their processing is unrestricted. Because sexual behavior, evolutionarily speaking, implies important concerns e.
The activation of conscious mechanisms should be facilitated in the absence of factors demanding cognitive and attentional resources, such as experimenter-imposed cognitive load.
An example of a conscious inhibitory mechanism in the context of sexual ad content is the phenomenon known as sexual content—induced delay SCID studied by Geer and colleagues Geer and Bellard, ; Geer and Melton, SCID refers to hesitancy in people's decision-making when they are exposed to sexual material. People are less quick to recognize and process sexual information than nonsexual information.
SCID is found to be more pronounced for women than for men. In lexical decision tasks that included sexual, romantic, and neutral words, women, but not men, displayed longer decision times when the target words were sexual. A similar, but smaller effect was also found for romantic words Geer and Manguno-Mire, Among reported gender differences were different gaze patterns, with men more focused on the sexual stimulus itself e. A gender difference in SCID makes evolutionary sense.
Unlike men, who maximize their mating opportunities, women, who invest more in offspring care and bear the burden during pregnancy, have more to lose from mating indiscriminately Bailey et al.
Therefore, when commitment thoughts are heightened in the presence of sexual content, women will regulate their response. Particularly, it is expected that a woman will search for information cues that are diagnostic of whether a man can share her burden, such as his popularity, wealth, or social aptness. Although to a lesser extent than women do, men will also regulate their response to sexual content.
Men's particular search, however, is focused on women's sexual attractiveness. The above predictions suggest that women and men on average have differential attitudes toward sexual ad content.
Nevertheless, neither evolutionary nor social determinism is likely to represent the whole truth about these differences. Not all people are nudged in the same direction by relationship commitment thoughts when judging sexual content. Individual differences are likely to play a role. Research that dates back to Alferd Kinsey in the nineteenth century Kinsey et al. As conceptualized by Simpson and Gangestad , sociosexuality refers to individual variation in the willingness to engage in sexual activities outside committed relationships.
The same authors developed the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory SOI scale to assess sociosexuality along a restricted—unrestricted continuum. Restricted people score low on the SOI scale and are inclined to engage in sexual activities exclusively in emotionally close and committed long-term relationships.
Unrestricted people score high on the SOI scale and show a tendency to engage in sexual activities with low commitment and investment, and have a short-term perspective about changing partners. The most recent development of the sociosexuality concept suggests that it consists of three sub-dimensions, attitude, desire, and behavior Penke and Asendorpf, Sex differences are more pronounced for desire than for attitude and behavior, and men are generally more unrestricted than women are on the SOI scale Schmitt, , Although, evolutionary psychology underlies the predictions made in the current research, these predictions are also consistent with socialization-based explanations for women's and men's reactions to sexual stimuli.
Differences in society's role expectations and in social influence, from parents, peers, and other significant influencers, are biased toward promoting male sexuality and undermining female sexuality Schwartz and Rutter, ; Baumeister and Twenge, , and are likely to shape women's more negative and men's more positive reactions and approaches to sexual stimuli Griffitt and Kaiser, Using the literature reviewed above, this research suggests that for advertising involving relevant sex appeals and unrestricted cognitive processing, commitment and sociosexuality will interact to create results that diverge from those reported for advertising involving gratuitous sex appeals and restricted cognitive processing.
Because it is reasonable to believe that men's and women's ad attitudes will depend on whether the sex appeal involves male or female nudity, hypotheses are derived for both male and female nudity. When the sexual content is relevant for the advertised product, consumers should be mildly positive toward it because it acts as a strong argument see Petty et al. Nevertheless, given that consumers are cognitively unrestricted, the concept SCID suggests that they are likely to regulate their response to sexual material.
In the context of relationship commitment, men and women regulate differently. Women are oriented toward offspring care and will value cues to that. If they instead encounter male nudity in an ad, they will experience a mismatch between stimuli and their current commitment thoughts, which leads to negative ad attitudes. Men are oriented toward physical characteristics irrespectively of commitment thoughts, and will generally value female nudity positively. H1: Women's attitudes toward ads featuring male nudity are less positive when their commitment thoughts are heightened than when not.
Men's attitudes toward ads featuring female nudity will remain unaffected by heightened commitment thoughts. Because women invest more in parenting than men do, they have more to lose from bad mating choices, and they have therefore become the choosier sex Trivers, ; Buss, Because women can be more selective, men have become the more competitive sex Buss and Schmitt, Although, commitment thoughts may evoke competitiveness in women, women are the choosier sex, so commitment thoughts may not automatically affect their competitiveness.
Women with high scores on sociosexuality are more sensitive to intrasex competition, because competition from other women is more salient to them. Hence, these women are likely to be more competitive in a commitment context including being more negative toward other women's physical attractiveness. Men are generally more competitive than women are.
Hence, men must engage in more intrasex competition than women do. Since men tend to have a recreational orientation toward sex, commitment is unlikely to influence their view on competition. Men are competitive with respect to both short-term and long-term relationships. So, regardless of commitment thoughts, men will dislike attractiveness in other males.
Further, men vary less in levels of sociaosexuality than women do Lippa, H2: Women with high levels of sociosexuality will have less positive attitudes toward ads featuring female nudity when their commitment thoughts are heightened, whereas women with low levels of sociosexuality will have attitudes that are more positive.
Men's attitudes toward ads featuring male nudity will remain unaffected by heightened commitment thoughts and levels of sociosexuality. To test the predictions that women exhibit more positive attitudes toward ads with product-relevant sexual content under normal circumstances than in conditions with heightened accessibility of relationship-commitment thoughts, and to test the moderating role of sociosexuality, an experimental study was conducted.
Amazon's crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk MTurk was used to collect data for the experiment. Although the typical MTurk sample is not demographically representative of the American population, it provides substantial variation along important demographic variables such as age, gender, income, education, employment situation, ethnicity, and religious beliefs Huff and Tingley, ; Levay et al. This variation was deemed necessary because an important variable in the present research is sociosexuality, a variable that develops differently in the population on several of these demographic variables.
Generally, a MTurk sample can be expected to contain slightly more educated people who have a slightly lower income than people in a sample from the population-based American National Election Studies Levay et al. Further, a MTurk sample has a number of strengths compared to a laboratory convenience sample, including heterogeneity, low coverage error, and few experimenter effects Paolacci et al. The sample consisted of MTurk participants 85 female.
Participants were between 18 and 66 years old with an average of Stimuli were two fictitious ads for the sunscreen brand Dr. Martins of Maui Appendix. One ad featured an attractive male model wearing swimming shorts and the other ad displayed an attractive bikini-clad female model. Ads were designed to portray an attractive male and an attractive female model, but in a product-relevant non-gratuitous context.
Models wearing a bikini or trunks are relevant for a sun lotion brand. To further facilitate the testing of the hypotheses, physical attractiveness was salient in both models whereas cues to popularity, wealth, social aptness, etc. Except for the models, all ad elements were the same for both ads. Both models were previously tested and found to be equally attractive Majoor, To evoke relationship-commitment thoughts, a priming procedure was used. Priming refers to the process whereby exposure to a certain experience subsequently increases the accessibility of a conceptual category, thereby increasing the likelihood of that category being used to encode and respond to new information Fiske and Taylor, Priming experiments typically expose participants to a stimulus called prime the particular experience that evokes associations in memory a particular conceptual category followed by exposure to a seemingly unrelated target stimulus.
In this experiment, participants were exposed to parenting by thinking and writing about benefits of having children. After this exposure prime , the concept of relationship commitment conceptual category is likely to be accessible and salient in participants' memory and, in turn, is readily available to be used by participants to judge the ads and their content target.
A 2 Gender: men vs. The first factor was participants' recorded sex. The second factor was priming of relationship commitment. Participants were randomly assigned to either a parenting priming condition or a happiness control condition.
These priming tasks were adapted from tasks used in previous studies e. Write down four or five such benefits. Write down four or five times you have been very happy in life. The descriptions provided by the participant in the priming tasks were in place to strengthen the manipulation and these descriptions were not subject to any further analysis.
This measure was used in a mediation analysis to assess whether obtained results were driven by affect. After the BMIS items, participants saw the ads and evaluated them on four items liking, appeal, attractiveness, pleasantness. All items were measured on seven-point bipolar scales e. This scale has three sub-dimensions: behavior number of partners last 12 months, number of one-night-stand partners, number of partners without having long-term interests , attitude sex without love is ok, comfortable with causal sex, certainty about long-term relations , and desire fantasies about uncommitted sex, sexual arousal evoked by non-partners, fantasies about spontaneous sex with strangers.
Given previous research on this scale Penke and Asendorpf, , it was expected that the differences between men and women would be more pronounced with respect to the desire dimension. As one of the hypotheses involves the metrically scaled moderator variable sociosexuality, a regression-based approach Process, Hayes, that avoids dichotomization, was chosen to test hypotheses. Regression analyses were run for each of the dependent variables—attitude toward the ad featuring a male model and attitude toward the ad featuring a female model.
To test H1, the attitude variables were regressed on the two independent dichotomous variables, parenting thoughts and the viewer's sex. To test H2, a third independent metrically scaled variable—sociosexuality—was included in the regression equation.
In all regressions, viewers' age was a covariate. For simplicity, figures containing only non-significant results will not be displayed. Results are shown graphically in Figure 1. Attitude toward the ad featuring the male model is measured on the Y-axis and relationship commitment primed by parenting vs. The solid line shows attitude level for men male experimental participants and the dashed line shows attitude level for women female experimental participants. If the solid and dashed lines have different patterns across the two different thought conditions, they indicate an interaction effect parenting thoughts have differential effects on men's and women's ad attitudes.
Figure 1. Attitude toward ad featuring male model by parenting thoughts and viewer's sex. This observation lends marginal support to the first part of H1.
This observation supports the second part of H1. These results lend weak support to H1, stating that women's attitudes toward ads with male nudity are less positive when their commitment thoughts are heightened, and that men's attitudes toward ads featuring female nudity remain unaffected by such thoughts.
These observations support the first part of H2. Figure 2. Attitude toward ad featuring female model by parenting thoughts and level of sociosexuality for women A and men B. These observations support the second part of H2. In summary, results support H2. When their commitment thoughts are heightened, women with higher levels of sociosexuality have less positive attitudes toward ads featuring same-sex nudity than women with low levels do. Men's attitudes toward same-sex nudity ads are unaffected by heightened commitment thoughts and levels of sociosexuality.
To control that the observed effect on attitude for the male model ad is not working through affect, a mediation analysis was performed. Sengupta and Dahl performed a similar analysis to confirm that affect was a mediator.
In this analysis, we expect affect to not be a significant mediator, because conscious regulatory mechanics are operating instead. But brand impressions are shaped by images in advertising, too.
Arguably, Calvin Klein and Victoria's Secret are not much different than Hanes or Vassarette, but perception studies show those brands are perceived as 'sexy,' and some customers want that.
The researchers looked at 3, full-page ads published in , , and in the popular magazines Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Esquire, Playboy, Newsweek, and Time.
The use of sex to sell everything from alcohol to banking services increased over the years. The ads were categorized based on the models' clothing or lack thereof and physical contact between models. The study showed that sex is used primarily to sell impulse purchases.
Much of the growth was seen in alcohol , entertainment and beauty advertising. Most of these industries are ones where sexual content is not out of place. For example, Axe uses sexually suggestive content to promote their body wash, because it isn't out of the ordinary to see exposed skin in an ad for a hygienic project. While many industries have dabbled in sexually suggestive advertisements at some point, there are two primary examples of industries that have not.
Advertisers that did not use sex in their ads included charitable organizations and computer companies. Charities and nonprofits focus on giving back to the community and enhancing the lives of others. Sexual imagery within their marketing materials would send the wrong message to those they are soliciting donations from.
If they depicted a scantily clad man or woman, their audience would likely not take them seriously and there would be backlash. Charitable organizations that deal with issues involving children, disease or social injustice don't want any sexual connotations associated with them. The other industry that rarely uses sex in advertisements is computer and software companies.
Like charitable organizations, these companies want to present themselves as serious and professional. They want consumers to know that their product is effective and reliable, and any sexual imagery could undermine that point. Unlike with beer advertisements, which show consumers having a good time and relaxing, or hygienic products, which naturally feature some exposed skin, there is no easy way to place sexual imagery in an ad for a computer company.
Tip: If your business is looking to increase sales, consider CRM software to help track every interaction with potential customers. Many kinds of companies use sex in their advertisements. Some might use sexual imagery to display a product like lingerie or underwear; others might use it to discuss a medical product like prescription medication or condoms. But some companies use sex solely to gain viewers' attention. For example, an advertisement for Carl's Jr. The overall relatively negative evaluations for the nude model ads should not necessarily exclude their use.
The Peterson and Kerin study is only a beginning in uncovering such variables and interactions, but it demonstrates a successful use of the experimental paradigm necessary to do so. The research reviewed in this paper has identified many factors which may influence the effectiveness of sexually-oriented advertising communications. Determining the relative importance of each and the ways in which they interact is a major undertaking for future research.
Focus groups, like those used by Johnson and Satow , may be helpful in identifying and probing these dimensions. The need for experimentation and information processing research methods seems an inescapable conclusion.
Multiple measures of advertising effectiveness seem essential for future research, but design should vary somewhat with the measures of concern. For instance, a realistic setting is of great importance for studies of brand recall, but may be of little consequence in measuring arousal.
New physiological measurement techniques might be borrowed from psychological research on erotica. For example, reliability and validity checks on a measurement device for female sexual arousal called a photoplethysmographic probe have shown excellent results.
The measure appears to be without artifacts and does not seem to interfere with attention to the stimuli. Both of these characteristics are improvements over a pencil and paper measure of arousal Wincze, Hoon, and Hoon, One problem inherent in any experimental work dealing with advertising effectiveness is the quality of the experimental ads.
An effective advertisement has multiple components, and neglecting any of these threatens to negate the managerial value of research findings. For instance, the lighting, facial expression, body position, background, etc, that most enhance a message accompanied by a nude model are likely to differ from those most appropriate when no model or a clothed model is present.
Care must be taken to make realistic, high quality ads without introducing confounding factors. Realization of this goal will be difficult, but it merits the additional effort. The purpose of this paper has been to suggest possible theoretical approaches to the study of sexual stimuli in advertising and to summarize the relevant literature. Several conclusions are forthcoming from this review. First, the role of sexually-oriented advertising stimuli may be more clearly understood through the theoretical constructs discussed in this paper.
It is also evident that the operation of each of these concepts is mediated by the consumer's enduring value system. The understanding of sex in competitive advertising is therefore contingent upon the consideration of personal values in the context of such theoretical constructs.
Another major conclusion stemming from this paper is the apparent opportunity for research in this area. Such research would offer practical input into the questions of advertising's role in society and the managerial uses of sexually-oriented advertising. It is imperative that any such empirical work employ stimuli designed to be realistic representations of advertising.
Research that is tied to a theoretical framework and possesses adequate external validity can develop the promising area of sexually-oriented stimuli into an important aspect of communications research.
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