Abstract
Plastic surgery is a popular form of appearance modification. Nonetheless, attitudes toward the recipients of plastic surgery remain divided. These attitudes may be indicative of an underlying moralisation of plastic surgery in contemporary society. To test this hypothesis, we examined perceptions of plastic surgery in the context of Moral Foundations Theory – a formal framework in which morality is categorised into five innate foundations: Sanctity, Care, Fairness, Loyalty, and Authority. Across two complementary online surveys with samples of 385 undergraduate psychology students (75% female) and 1533 sexual minority men, respectively, we investigated participants’ valuation of each moral foundation and their moral condemnation of plastic surgery. Results indicated that scores on Sanctity predicted moral condemnation, such that participants who valued Sanctity more highly were more likely to perceive plastic surgery as morally fraught. Sanctity encompasses naturalness and purity elements of morality. As such, results were explored in the context of two broad theories: feminist theory, which posits that unnatural beauty is perceived as unfavourably as ugliness itself, and evolutionary theory, which suggests that unnatural stimuli are moralised because they elicit innate and powerful disgust reactions. Ultimately, we concluded that the underlying societal moralisation of plastic surgery is attributable to perceptions of plastic surgery as fundamentally unnatural. Implications for interventions targeted at eradicating plastic surgery condemnation are discussed.
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Sarah Bonell is under the supervision of Scott Griffiths, who is supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council Early Career Fellowship (grant number: 1121538). The funder had no role in the study design, data collection or analysis, write-up of the manuscript, or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.
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Bonell, S., Murphy, S.C., Austen, E. et al. When (fake) beauty turns ugly: Plastic surgery as a moral violation. Curr Psychol 41, 5444–5457 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01060-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01060-0