Perceived causes of obesity, emotions, and attitudes about Discrimination Policy

Although obesity represents a potential public health crisis, our understanding of public perceptions of obesity, emotional responses to the obese, and related policy preferences is limited.

We employed Weiner's attribution theory of controllability (Weiner, 1988, 2011) to examine perceived causes of obesity, emotional responses, and related policy implications. If the perceived cause is controllable (eating and lifestyle habits), we expected less sympathy and greater anger toward obese people and support for prejudicial hiring policies based on weight. If the cause is perceived as uncontrollable (genetic), sympathy is anticipated as well as opposition to such hiring policies.

We conducted multivariate analyses with data from two nationally representative surveys of U.S. adults.

Our findings supported the hypotheses, showing that sympathy and lack of anger toward obese people are strongly determined by a genetic attribution for obesity. Moreover, sympathy and the genetic attribution are significant predictors of opposition to hiring policies that discriminate against obese people. Finally, in a second study, chief among several causal attributions for obesity-lack of will power, lack of exercise, marketing of foods, and genetics-we discovered biological attribution functions as the key predictor of perceptions that obese people are frequent targets of discrimination. We suggest governments and the food industry should be more attuned to the underlying beliefs of the public about the causes of obesity when formulating programs and policies to address the issue.