"There She Is, Your Ideal" Negative Social Comparisons and Health Behaviors

We provide novel evidence on the role of negative social comparisons in population health behaviors by exploiting variation in Miss America and Miss USA beauty pageant winners. We show that there was more front-page newspaper coverage and more pageant-related internet search behavior following a home-state win. Teen girls and pageant-aged women with home-state winners were more likely to report that they were trying to lose weight, and pregnant women gained less gestational weight. We do not detect meaningful changes for teen boys, young adult men, or older women for whom social comparisons were plausibly less salient