The Salience of Overweight in Personality Characterization

Summary

It is argued that the stigma attached to overweight or obesity often causes overweight to operate as a “master status.” College students (N = 223) were asked to write stories about male and female stimulus characters who varied only in body image. It was hypothesized that subjects writing about overweight stimulus characters would be more likely than those writing about normal weight characters to (a) write sad or negative stories, (b) create unpleasant characters, and (c) describe their characters with more negative personality characteristics on a semantic differential personality scale. Support was found for part (a) and (b) of the hypothesis but not part (c). The relationships were stronger when the stimulus was a picture than when it was a descriptive paragraph and when the stimulus character was female rather than male. There was indication that female subjects were more likely to associate an overweight body image with an unpleasant personality than were male subjects.