Weight Loss Effort and Anti-Fat Attitudes on Perceptions of a Target's Sociability and Experienced Exclusion

Abstract

Research has shown that a negativity bias exists for surgical weight loss methods that are considered to be low in effort (Mattingly, Stambush, & Hill). We examined if this anti-surgery bias was merely an anti-effort bias, and if this bias was dependent on one's endorsement of anti-fat attitudes. For those high in anti-fat attitudes, the high-effort weight loss target was rated more positively and was perceived as having been teased more in the past than the low-effort target. The current study demonstrates that whether an individual is still subject to the negative attributions associated with overweight people is dependent on the effort they exerted in order to lose weight and the evaluator's endorsement of anti-fat attitudes.