More than skin deep: a self-consistency approach to the psychology of cosmetic surgery.

Underlying attitudes about the general self and the specific body part operated on in cosmetic surgery were investigated. It was hypothesized that female cosmetic surgery patients would feel less favorably toward their noses, faces, or breasts than toward their overall self. These marked inconsistencies would cause "normal" individuals to seek practical solutions of enhancing the esteem of the particular body part, to make it consistent with their general view of themselves. Forty female cosmetic surgery patients were tested before and 2 and 4 months after surgery. In all, 12 hypotheses were made within the general self-consistency framework and 11 were upheld at levels ranging from 0.02 to 0.001. Self-consistency theory accurately represents the female cosmetic surgery patient as a normal woman in terms of self-esteem who is attempting to remediate a consciously felt inconsistency between general and specific body-part esteem. Cosmetic surgery seems to reduce this inconsistency.