What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

by Aubrey Gordon

less bias, by as much as 33 percent on implicit measures,” with nearly half of people also self-reporting changes in their own attitudes.25 Similarly, if less dramatically, test takers’ implicit bias on the basis of race also decreased by 17 percent. While most measures of implicit bias decreased or remained stable, one measure exploded: anti-fat bias. In those nine years, pro-thin, anti-fat bias increased by a full 40 percent. Not only that, but weight-based bias was the slowest changing of all explicit attitudes—that is, the attitudes that test takers self-reported. According to Charlesworth: It is the only attitude out of the six that we looked at that showed any hint of getting more biased over time. . . . And of course again the question might be: why? What is specific about body-weight attitude? We can only speculate: Body weight has been the target of much discussion, but discussion in a negative light. We often talk about the “obesity epidemic,” or about “the problem” with obese individuals. Also, we typically think about body weight as something that people can control, and so we are more likely to make the moral judgement of, “Well, you should just change.”