weight bias

  1. redirectSocial stigma of obesity

In addition to questionnaires and explicit measurements, researchers used IAT to roughly assess people's biases regarding weight. As recorded in the paper published by Teachman in 2003, a study conducted on more than 100 college students confirmed that people might have no bias towards overweight patients in questionnaires, but further IAT tests showed the implicit feature of "thin preference" to varying degrees that was widespread. Even after being informed that obesity is a phenomenon caused by genes, the so-called compassion is still not sufficient to influence the implicit bias, and the IAT can still clearly demonstrate the true preference orientation.

Teachman, B. A.; Gapinski, K. D.; Brownell, K. D.; Rawlins, M.; Jeyaram, S. (2003). “Demographic and personality predictors of implicit and explicit attitudes toward fat people”. International Journal of Obesity, 27 (7): 888–897. doi:10.1038/sj.ijo.0802290.