Implicit and explicit weight bias among healthcare professionals

Patients with overweight and obesity are negatively impacted by weight bias in healthcare, leading to poor quality of care and poor health outcomes. Implicit bias can be estimated from reaction times during Implicit Association Tests (IATs), and explicit bias can be self-reported. Data from over one million online survey responses collected by Project Implicit between 2006-2022 suggest that implicit and explicit weight bias persist among diagnosing and treating practitioners, other healthcare workers, and non-healthcare workers. Moreover, our findings indicate that diagnosing and treating workers could express more explicit bias than others. Across all three occupation groups examined, it appears that men have more explicit negative attitudes toward people with obesity, and explicit weight bias appears to be decreasing over time. Given the powerful impact healthcare workers have on the experiences of patients, more efforts should be made to educate them on how to recognize their weight biases, the negative impact of those biases, and how to take appropriate action.