Lucas Franieck, from Nova SBE, will present his research. 

Body-Shape Politics: The Political Divide in Body-Inclusive Advertising

Brands increasingly feature plus-size women in advertising, challenging prevailing beauty standards. However, not all consumers react positively to brands that do so—We propose and find that one factor explaining heterogeneous reactions is political ideology. Across four studies, we show that political conservatism predicts less favorable brand attitudes and purchase intentions toward ads featuring plus-size (vs. slim) models, reflecting conservatives’ stronger motivation to maintain status hierarchies in the beauty domain. These effects are mediated by social dominance orientation—a tendency among conservatives to prefer hierarchical social structures and status-based differentiation between groups. Finally, these effects emerge specifically when a plus-size model’s status is grounded in appearance—thereby challenging a beauty-based hierarchy—but disappears when status is anchored in achievement, which upholds an alternative, merit-based hierarchy and decouples body weight from social rank. The latter finding suggests that emphasizing non-appearance-based sources of status can mitigate resistance to portrayals of plus-size models in ads among conservative consumers.