Social norms, ideal body weight and food attitudes

Abstract

This paper uses French data on ideal body weight and food attitudes to analyse the role of social norms in the individual's weight control problem. A proxy measure of social norms is calculated by averaging individual perceptions of the ideal body mass index (BMI) over all observations within a reference group. Testing for di¤erent de…nitions of the reference group, we …nd that individual representations of ideal body shape are di¤erentiated mainly along gender and age lines. Social norms regarding body shape have a signi…cant e¤ect on perceptions of ideal BMI only for those women who want to lose weight, with an elasticity close to 0.5. For many women and for all men, ideal BMI is almost exclusively determined by habitual BMI. Last, ideal BMI predicts a number of attitudes toward food, while social norms do not. These results suggest that promoting medical norms regarding body shape should have little e¤ect on individual food attitudes.JEL codes: C21, D11, D12, I10, Z13.

The determinants of misreporting weight and height: The role of social norms

“…This would explain why many older individuals show a greater unawareness of their actual weight or height. In addition, since we assume that an individual's weight and height self-reports are partly driven by his or her own ideal or desired body image, our conceptual framework considers that such self-reports ultimately depend on the reporting behavior of a close reference group (social norms) as to what constitutes an ideal body weight (see, Etilé , 2007;Powdthavee, 2009). In line with the discussion above and the literature on the determinants of weight and height self-reporting biases, our econometric specification contains the following set of covariates (Table 2) (2000), Gillum and Sempos (2005) and 11 Note that crucial to our analysis is the fact that at the time of the home interview individuals report their weight and height without knowing that they might be invited to participate in an examination survey during which some measurements will be taken.…”

“…Mirroring the literature on social norms or peer influences, we assume that social norms regarding what constitutes an ideal body weight also affect individuals' self-reporting decisions when answering anthropometric questions on health questionnaires (see Etilé , 2007;Powdthavee, 2009). However, whether this social environmental effect constitutes a general concern for researchers working with self-reported data is a question under empirical scrutiny and will depend on the size of this social norm effect (Powdthavee, 2009).…”

Self-reported health and gender: The role of social norms

“…Similarly, life satisfaction appears to decrease with relative BMI. Etilé (2007) goes one step further and shows that social norms play a key role in the determination of ideal body weight, in particular for women. Social norms are captured by the average of ideal BMI in the reference group, where the ideal BMI is computed using the weight individuals report as the one they would like to "reach or keep".…”

“…In the literature, social norms are usually captured by the average corresponding characteristic -for example the average ideal weight in the obesity literature -in the reference group -see Etilé (2007) and Gil and Mora (2011). In our framework, the reference group is work colleagues.…”

A mass phenomenon: The social evolution of obesity

“…2 Some empirical studies on obesity and social interaction are motivated with rudimentary models (Etilé, 2007, Blanchflower et al, 2008. Burke and Heiland (2007) propose a model of social dynamics of obesity, which -like the present study -emphasizes the role of a social multiplier in the gradual amplification of obesity prevalence.…”