The Development of Stereotyped Expectancies of Body Build-Behavior Relations

50 males, ranging in age from 10 through 20 years, assigned items from a list of 30 phrases, which described various personal and social behaviors, to photographs representing an adult male endomorph, mesomorph, and ectomorph. The results indicated that a common body build-behavior stereotype exists in this age range. The mesomorph somatotype was associated with socially "positive" behavioral descriptions, whereas the endomorph and ectomorph somatotypes had socially "negative" behavioral descriptions associated with them.