Body objectification, social pressure, and disordered eating behavior in college women: The role of sorority membership

Social pressure to conform to the thin ideal is believed to play a decisive role in the development of eating disorders. In this field study at a college with only sophomore rush, 99 sorority women, 80 nonsorority women past their first year, and 86 first-year women completed three subscales of the Eating Disorders Inventory-2 (Garner, 1991), the Objectified Body Consciousness Scale (McKinley & Hyde, 1996), and a measure of peer social pressure. It was hypothesized that women belonging to sororities as well as those who intended to join would score higher than nonsorority and first-year women with no intention to join on these measures of disordered eating, body objectification, and social pressure. It also was predicted that the amount of time spent living in a sorority house as well as degree of social pressure would correlate positively with higher scores on body objectification and disordered eating. Results supported nearly all hypotheses, suggesting both that sororities attract at-risk women and that living in a sorority house is associated with increased likelihood of disordered eating. Sociocultural theories of disordered eating propose that pressure to conform to an unrealistically thin appearance plays an important role in the development of eating dis-orders. According to Fredrickson and Roberts’s (1997) ob-jectification theory, chronic sexual objectification of women teaches girls and women to accept and internalize an ob-server’s view of themselves. Such self-objectification has been found to correlate with lack of internal awareness and body shame, contribute to low body esteem, and predict disordered eating behavior (Calogero, Davis, & Thomp