A series of five experiments reported that people tend to deny overweight individuals mental agency, but not experience. Heavier weight people are seen as less capable of controlling their own lives, thinking and acting autonomously. However, weight did not affect the level of experience ascribed to the person being assessed. The study was published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Negative feelings, stereotypes about and discrimination against heavier-weight people are widespread. They affect how heavier-weight people are treated in social situations from private life to discrimination in education, employment and medical treatment. Scientists call this the “anti-fat stigma” and describe it as “a pervasive ideology targeting heavier-weight people” that occurs across countries, gender, race and age.
“I was interested in understanding how people conflate bodily capacities with mental capacities, and how this intersects with harmful anti-fat beliefs,” said study author Mattea Sim, a visiting research scientist at Indiana University. “We know that people discriminate against heavier-weight people in contexts that should be entirely unrelated to weight, like in the workplace or at school. It seemed like observers were making inferences about a person’s mental sophistication based on their body, which is exactly what we came to find.”
In the scope of anti-fat stigma, heavier-weight people are viewed as responsible for their weight and this is accompanied by a feeling of disgust towards such people. Heavier-weight people often internalize the anti-fat stigma resulting in low self-esteem, eating disorders and psychological distress. Being lazy and lacking self control are the two of the most common stereotypes about heavier-weight people.
Study authors note that “perceiving others as having human mental sophistication brings them into the moral community.” However studies have shown that people often dehumanize others denying their uniquely human mental capacities. Does that happen to heavier-weight people?
To answer this question Sim and her colleagues conducted a series of 5 social experiments, some of which consisted of several smaller ones. They hypothesized that heavier-weight individuals would be”dementalized,” assigned less sophisticated mental capacities than average-weight people.
Participants were Mturk workers and their numbers in each of the studies varied between around 50 and 200. In each of the experiments, participants were shown a number of pictures of bodies of different weight in random order, with variations in what was on the picture across different experiments. They were asked to evaluate the mental agency of people the bodies belong to and its various aspects, level of experience and other properties.
In the last two experiments participants were asked to assess fitness of people whose bodies were presented for certain work roles or to guess the profession of the person whose body is in the picture. Participants were told that the study was investigating whether people could infer other’s personality from their bodies.
Across all experiments, results repeatedly showed that heavier-weight people are seen as having less mental agency than average-weight people, but not necessarily having less experience. People with heavier-weight bodies were clearly seen as having less capacity to think and make autonomous decisions. More precisely, results showed that heavier-weight people were seen as being less capable of thinking and purposeful behavior, but this did not extend to their capacity to experience emotions.
Heavier-weight and average-weight people were seen as having equal capacities for experiencing various emotions. This finding held regardless of whether participants were shown photos of real people or computer-generated images, whether they were shown just pictures of torsos or of full bodies. Females were seen as having more mental agency than men, but this was regardless of weight.
Further study showed that heavier-weight people are seen as less physically capable (lower physical agency) and that this perception might in turn lead participants to believe that those whose physical capabilities are lower (because of their weight) are also less capable of mental activity. Another link between weight and mental agency was found to go over the feeling of disgust, that participants reported having about heavier-weights.
The final two studies showed that participants assessed that heavier-weight people would be less capable in work roles requiring mental agency than average-weight people, while this was not the case for roles requiring experience. When asked to guess professions of people whose pictures were shown, participants tended to assume that heavier weight participants work in roles than require experience, but not in roles that require thinking or autonomous decision-making i.e. mental agency.
“The body is not a window to the mind, but people seem to use it as such,” Sim told PsyPost. “Observers believe heavier-weight people have less sophisticated minds than lighter-weight people. This is a harmful form of dehumanization that may contribute to anti-fat discrimination. A person’s weight cannot reveal how effectively they can think, plan, or remember, and does not determine how suited they are for societal roles.”
The study sheds light on a rarely studied link between perceived weight of persons and how others perceive their mental capacities. It should be noted that all participants in the studies were Mturk workers and studies on different populations might yield different results. All images presented were static and results might have been different if people were tasked to assess videos or real persons. Finally, most of the images were male and presented in inverted colors to conceal the race of the person in the picture.
“It will be very important to further investigate how these effects occur at the intersection of different identities,” Sim said. “People with multiple marginalized identities are often subject to unique forms of stereotyping and discrimination. It will be important to understand whether observers evaluate heavier-weight people differently depending on other intersecting identities, such as race, gender, or disability.”
The study, “Bodies and Minds: Heavier Weight Targets Are De-Mentalized as Lacking in Mental Agency“, was authored by Mattea Sim, Steven M. Almaraz, and Kurt Hugenberg.
