Automatic and Controlled Components of Prejudice Toward Fat People: Evaluation Versus Stereotype Activation

By Gayle R. Bessenoff, Jeffrey W. Sherman. 2000

256 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study investigated automatic and controlled components of anti-fat attitudes, the relationship between these components, and the extent to which each component predicts prejudicial behavior. Participants were primed with pictures of fat and thin women. Automatic activation of both evaluative responses and stereotypic knowledge were examined with lexical decision judgments on fat-stereotypical, thin-stereotypical, and stereotype-irrelevant trait words. Results showed greater automatic activation of negative evaluations to fat than thin women. Although, in general, automatic measures were found to be unrelated to self-reported anti-fat attitudes, one subcomponent of automatic evaluation was correlated with higher expressed dislike of fat persons. In addition, the automatic but not the controlled attitudinal measure predicted how far participants chose to sit from a fat woman. No stereotypicality effects were observed. Implications for reducing prejudice toward fat persons are discussed.

Subfields: Pharmacy, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97c4f01125fd3e52ea38460d5a2358925100bbec

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Citations in the corpus

The influence of experimentally created extrapersonal associations on the Implicit Association Test (2006, background): “Similarly, Blair, Ma, and Lenton (2001) found weaker gender stereotypes after having participants create mental images of counter-stereotypic (strong) women.”
Can the Media Affect Us? Social Comparison, Self-Discrepancy, and the Thin Ideal (2006, background): “It is also not enough just to oppose the norm consciously; although we may not endorse a particular idea, we may still be significantly affected by it (e.g., Bessenoff & Sherman, 2000; Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997).”
Implicit measures in social cognition. research: their meaning and use. (2003, background): “In an investigation of attitudes toward fat people, Bessenoff & Sherman (2000) found that a priming measure involving photos of fat and thin women predicted how far participants later placed their own chair from that of a fat woman.”
Implicit Attitudes and Discrimination Against People with Physical Disabilities (2011, unknown): “For instance, implicit anti-fat prejudice, but not explicit anti-fat attitudes, predicts how far people sit from an overweight woman (Bessenoff & Sherman, 2000).”
Complimentary Weightism: The Potential Costs of Appearance-Related Commentary for Women's Self-Objectification (2009, background): “…are complimentary weight and shape comments associated with negative outcomes at the individual level, but they may be a seemingly innocuous transmitter of fat prejudice at the societal level (e.g., Bessenoff & Sherman, 2000; Crandall, 1994; Hebl & Mannix, 2003; Vartanian, Herman, & Polivy, 2005).”
Implicit and Explicit Stigma of Mental Illness in Diagnosed and Healthy Samples (2006, background): “For instance, Bessenoff and Sherman (2000) used a lexical decision task to demonstrate that implicit anti–fat evaluations predicted how far participants chose to sit from an overweight woman, whereas explicit attitudes did not.”
A lesson in bias: The relationship between implicit racial bias and performance in pedagogical contexts (2016, background): “…implicit prejudice is associated with heightened anxiety during interracial interaction; it is positively associated with feelings of discomfort (Bessenoff & Sherman, 2000; Dasgupta & Rivera, 2006; Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997; Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002; Fazio…”
The existence of implicit bias is beyond reasonable doubt: A refutation of ideological and methodological objections and executive summary of ten studies that no manager should ignore (2009, unknown): “…Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002), gender (Banaji & Hardin, 1996), sexual orientation (Dasgupta & Rivera, 2006; Jost et al., 2004), body shape (e.g., Bessenoff & Sherman, 2000), the elderly (Perdue & Gurtman, 1990), adolescents (Gross & Hardin, 2007), and even ﬁctitious groups created in the…”