Health is in the Eye of the Beholder: The Impact of Social Norms on Perceived Health Dispositions

Abstract

The field of health practices is one in which broader cultural ideologies are expressed as well as one subjected to social regulations legitimized through widely valued and shared standards taken from mundane perceptions. In this research, we investigated how cultural ideologies, here operationalized as social norms, influence people’s perceptions of the state of health and health behavior of others. These perceptions were investigated in two independent studies using impression-management tasks. The participants were asked to judge a target with respect to socially valued characteristics that were not directly related to health: attractiveness (Study 1) and future orientation (Study 2). We found that broader and implicit ideologies indeed had an influence on the participants’ perceptions of the targets’ general state of health and participants’ attributions of health behaviors to the targets. Our results invite a more systematic analysis of the relationships between dominant sets of values and norms and health-related perceptions of others.