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In an experiment by Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues, undergraduate women completed a math test while wearing a swimsuit. While this setup lacked mundane realism—since students rarely take math tests in swimsuits in real life—it demonstrated high psychological realism. The artificial situation successfully triggered the real-world psychological process of self-objectification, which diverted the women's attention and impaired their math performance, demonstrating how laboratory studies can effectively generalize underlying psychological mechanisms even in unusual settings.

Fredrickson's Swimsuit Math Test Experiment

Although the setup of Fredrickson's swimsuit math test experiment lacked mundane realism, what did the study successfully demonstrate by triggering the real-world process of self-objectification?

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