Imitative Obesity and Relative Utility

Social Science Research Network, 2009

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

If human beings care about their relative weight, a form of imitative obesity can emerge (in which people subconsciously keep up with the weight of the Joneses). Using Eurobarometer data on 29 countries, this paper provides cross-sectional evidence that overweight perceptions and dieting are influenced by a person's relative BMI, and longitudinal evidence from the German Socioeconomic Panel that well-being is influenced by relative BMI. Highly educated people see themselves as fatter -- at any given actual weight -- than those with low education. These results should be treated cautiously, and fixed-effects estimates are not always well-determined, but there are grounds to take seriously the possibility of socially contagious obesity.

Subfields: Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a7915b9b582460a838d79d011b90142654aaebfe

Citations in the corpus

• Work, Jobs and Well-Being Across the Millennium (2009, unknown): “(Powdthavee, 2009) and weight ( Blanchflower et al., 2009, and Clark and Etile, 2008).”
• Household finances and well-being in Australia: An empirical analysis of comparison effects☆ (2016, unknown): “For example, Blanchflower, Landeghem, and Oswald (2009) show that an individual’s perceptions of weight are influenced by their relative body mass index, whilst Mujcic and Frijters (2015) report a comparison health effect using Australian data.”