The Salience of Overweight in Personality Characterization

Abstract

It is argued that the stigma attached to overweight or obesity often causes overweight to operate as a "master status." College students (N = 223) were asked to write stories about male and female stimulus characters who varied only in body image. It was hypothesized that subjects writing about overweight stimulus characters would be more likely than those writing about normal weight characters to (a) write sad or negative stories, (b) create unpleasant characters, and (c) describe their characters with more negative personality characteristics on a semantic differential personality scale. Support was found for part (a) and (b) of the hypothesis but not part (c). The relationships were stronger when the stimulus was a picture than when it was a descriptive paragraph and when the stimulus character was female rather than male. There was indication that female subjects were more likely to associate an overweight body image with an unpleasant personality than were male subjects.

Social, Educational, and Psychological Correlates of Weight Status in Adolescents

“…To the extent that stereotypes influence behaviors that in turn influence interpersonal relationships, these results are consistent with observations reported in the literature that anti‐fat stereotypes have adverse consequences for obese adolescents (33, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57). Results also revealed adverse social outcomes for underweight boys, and these observations are consistent with the lesser investigated phenomenon of anti‐thin stereotypes for males (30, 36).…”

Epistemology, Family Patterns, and Psychosomatics: The Case of Obesity

“…The obesity itself may also contribute to avoidance of conflict. Obesity is heavily stigmatized in American society and stereotyped qualities such as immoral self‐indulgence, weakness, laziness, lack of self‐control, stupidity, dirtiness, and inferiority are often attributed to obese individuals (3, 4, 31). When conflicts arise in a family system, they can be attributed to these alleged characterological defects.…”

Weight bias: Investigating the impact of an empathy-evoking intervention in reducing mental health professionals' anti-fat attitudes

“…While it is unknown whether these 10 participants are catgorised as 'Underweight' due to genetic make-up, illness, or physical training, these participants may be more content with their weight due to various health and physical benefits, the avoidance of societal weight discrimination, and consider their body shape to be closer to the societal 'ideal' than their overweight and obese counterparts. Research also shows that overweight people evoke negative emotional reactions in others, such as, pity, fear, disgust and hostility (Allon, 1979;Hiller, 1981;Weiner, Perry & Magnuson, 1988).…”

“…It could be speculated that this difference may be due to the fact that preoccupation with weight gain and body image is more of an issue for woman than men. Already mentioned is that overweight people may possibly evoke negative emotions such as fear and disgust (Allon, 1979;Hiller, 1981;Weiner, Perry & Magnuson, 1988), while there is also literature highlighting women's hate and fear of weight gain (Guille & Chrisler, 1999;Hesse-Biber, 2007). It can be speculated that this hate and fear of weight gain has to do with the extent women experience weight bias, with Puhl, Andreyeva and Brownell (2008) noting that it only takes a modest weight gain for a woman to experience weight discrimination.…”