Health as an Alibi: The Virtuous Framing of Appearance Pursuits

In many societies, attaining cultural ideals of physical attractiveness is desirable (e.g., being beautiful), but pursuing physical attractiveness is not (e.g., being vain). How do people address these paradoxical standards? We argue that people meet the standards to both appear slim and appear to have good values by disguising their true motives for ambiguous actions (i.e., diet and exercise): they project more virtuous health motives to others despite being actually driven by physical appearance motives. Five preregistered studies and two supplemental studies (N = 4,321) find evidence for this behavior and offer an intervention to increase the extent to which people are actually driven by health (vs. physical appearance) motives in private. Moreover, we find that this behavior is driven by the desire to be seen by others as having good values. Altogether, this research contributes to a better understanding of the distorted discourse surrounding health, diet, exercise, and appearance.