The Effects of Obesity-Related Health Messages on Explicit and Implicit Weight Bias.

Almut Rudolph,Anja Hilbert

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02064

Abstract

The pervasiveness of explicit and implicit weight bias (WB) defined as negative stereotypes and prejudice regarding one’s weight has been observed among individuals of all weight categories. As a source of WB, health messages have been discussed due to reinforcing stigmatizing notions. The present study sought to investigate whether health messages (i.e., eat healthy, become physically active) have the potential to increase explicit and implicit WB. Participants (N = 144) from the community were randomized to either an experimental group (EG) or a control group (CG). While the EG was presented with health messages, the CG was presented with neutral information. Before and after manipulation, participants completed measures of explicit and implicit WB. Paired samples t-test revealed no differences in explicit WB after manipulation, however, a small effect decrease of implicit WB in the EG but not in the CG was found. This study provided evidence that health messages might have differential impact to change WB. According to dual-model approaches, explicit and implicit WB tap into two different information processing systems, and thus were differentially affected by health messages. Brief exposure to health messages might have the potential to contribute to health behavior and to mitigate implicit WB.

Highlights

Overweight and obese individuals experience pervasive weight bias (WB), defined as negative stereotypes and prejudice regarding their weight, in multiple domains of life, for example, in employment, in educational and health care settings, in the media as well as in interpersonal relationships (Puhl and Heuer, 2009; Puhl and King, 2013)
Implicit WB, is the automatic and not necessarily conscious evaluation in an impulsive system that can be assessed with implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al, 1998)
experimental group (EG) and control group (CG) did not differ in gender, age, or BMI

Summary

Introduction

Overweight and obese individuals experience pervasive WB, defined as negative stereotypes and prejudice regarding their weight, in multiple domains of life, for example, in employment, in educational and health care settings, in the media as well as in interpersonal relationships (Puhl and Heuer, 2009; Puhl and King, 2013). WB has been observed using self-report questionnaires (i.e., explicit WB; Allison et al, 1991), and computerized measures (i.e., implicit WB; Phelan et al, 2014). Dual-model approaches (e.g., Strack and Deutsch, 2004) provide an elaborated theoretical framework comprising two structurally distinct systems of cognitive processing that encompasses explicit and implicit evaluations. In a WB-IAT, respondents are required to co-classify stimuli in target categories (i.e., Obese vs Thin) or attribute categories (i.e., Positive vs Negative). Whereas critics find fault with the arbitrary metric of the IAT (e.g., Blanton and Jaccard, 2006), previous research revealed typically weak correlations between explicit and implicit measures corroborating the theoretical dual-model framework (Hofmann et al, 2005; Brauhardt et al, 2014; Rudolph and Hilbert, 2014). Several studies have documented the reliability of the IAT (e.g., Rudolph et al, 2008), and the predictive validity of implicit measures over and above self-report measures (Dovidio et al, 2002; Rudolph et al, 2010; Brauhardt et al, 2014)

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