Carrying the Weight: Effects of Anti-Fat Bias on Affiliative Responses Towards Friends of the Overweight

Abstract

The stigma by association research suggests that people who interact with members of stigmatized groups are judged more negatively and devalued based on this association. The purpose of this study is to test whether anti-fat bias affects perceptions of people who associate with overweight people, and identify the causes of this stigmatization. We tested how participants who score high on anti-fat bias measures rate friends of overweight people and whether this relationship is mediated by perceived similarity, affect-transference, or stereotype-transference. We also tested if this relationship is stronger for female targets than for male targets. We found that higher implicit anti-fat bias predicted more negative affiliative responses towards friends of overweight females, but there was no significant relationship between implicit anti-fat bias and affiliative responses towards friends of normal-weight females and friends of both normalweight and overweight males. This relationship was only mediated by perceived similarity to the target. Furthermore, the participants’ explicit anti-fat attitudes did not moderate the interaction between implicit anti-fat bias and affiliation. Keywords: obesity bias, stigma by association, implicit anti-fat bias, affiliative responses, perceived similarity