The moralization of obesity

Rationale: Weight stigma is prevalent in Western society and has numerous negative effects on people with obesity. There remains a strong and currently unmet need to understand why anti-fat attitudes are tenacious and what intervention strategies might best produce lasting attitude change.

Objective: Many negative effects of weight stigma can be integrated by noting that people differ in the extent to which they see obesity as a moral failing. Drawing from moral psychology and weight stigma literature, we hypothesized that greater moral disapproval of obesity would be linked to greater control attributions and disgust towards obese people, stronger endorsement of discrimination, perception of greater health risks associated with obesity, resistance to attitude change, and negative perceptions of people who have bariatric surgery.

Method: Three studies were conducted with U.S.-based online samples in 2017-2018, and were analyzed with correlational, analysis of variance, and linear regression models.

Results: In Study 1, greater moralization of obesity predicted stronger belief in the controllability of obesity, greater disgust towards obese people, stronger endorsement of discrimination against obese individuals, and the perception of greater health risks associated with obesity. In Study 2, people with stronger moralized obesity attitudes rated arguments for classifying obesity as a disease as less convincing, demonstrating that moralized obesity attitudes are more resistant to persuasion than nonmoral attitudes. In Study 3, greater moralization predicted more negative responses to an individual who had bariatric surgery, even when the individual exerted strong diet and exercise-related effort to make the surgery successful.

Conclusion: A moral view of obesity explains why control attributions and disgust are essential components of weight stigma, and why antifat attitudes are resistant to change. We conclude with suggestions for future research and consideration of the implications of obesity moralization for other chronic health conditions.