Is obesity treated like a contagious disease?

Abstract

The behavioral avoidance of people with obesity is well documented, but its psychological basis is poorly understood. Based upon a disease avoidance account of stigmatization, we tested whether a person with obesity triggers equivalent self‐reported emotional and avoidant‐based responses as a contagious disease (i.e., influenza). Two hundred and sixty‐four participants rated images depicting real disease signs (i.e., person with influenza), false alarms (i.e., person with obesity), person with facial bruising (i.e., negative control), and a healthy control for induced emotion and willingness for contact along increasing levels of physical proximity. Consistent with our prediction, as the prospect for contact became more intimate, self‐reported avoidance was equivalent in the influenza and obese target conditions, with both significantly exceeding reactions to the negative and healthy controls. In addition, participants reported greatest levels of disgust toward the obese and influenza target conditions. These results are consistent with an evolved predisposition to avoid individuals with disease signs. Implicit avoidance occurs even when participants know explicitly that such signs—here, obese body form—result from a noncontagious condition. Our findings provide important evidence for a disease avoidance explanation of the stigmatization of people with obesity.

Ugliness Is in the Gut of the Beholder

“…Indeed, the fact that disgust is responsive to signs that resemble occurrent or historic infection helps to explain why disabled people, congenitally deformed people, obese people, people with "disfigurements" such as birthmarks, and the elderly, specifically, tend to be found to be disgusting, and indeed ugly (on Ugliness-Disgustingness) by some. In the case of obesity, for example, obese people have been shown to be found to be more disgusting than people with influenza (e.g., Tapp et al 2020) and to be associated with disease (e.g., Miller & Manner 2012;Park et al 2007), and this is thought to be partly because obesity is perceptually similar to the symptoms of certain contagious diseases (e.g., Lieberman et al 2012).…”

Infection threat shapes our social instincts

“…Yet, possibly because parasites make people look or behave unusually, our hypervigilant concern about pathogens leads us to perceive any abnormal appearance or behavior as a possible sign of infection (Kurzban and Leary 2001 ; Nussinson et al 2018 ). So the circle of people we tend to avoid, in particular if we feel vulnerable to infection, extends to those who are disabled (Park et al 2003 ), overweight (Park et al 2007 ; Tapp et al 2020 ), or mentally ill (Lund 2014 ); to those who are attracted to people of the same sex (Kiss et al 2020 ); and to those who have an unfamiliar ethnicity (Faulkner et al 2004 ). Likewise, primate groups have been observed to keep newcomers semi-quarantined for weeks or months at the periphery of the group before accepting them in their midst (Hart 2011 ).…”

Bringing disgust in through the backdoor in healthy food promotion: a phenomenological perspective

“…Signs of increased weight were and still are interpreted as signs that an individual has “lost control” and the body is interpreted as an indicator of one’s personality often leading to the stigmatization of the individual in question (DeJong 1980 ; Pausé 2017 ). And the perception of obesity as a disease goes so far that people interpret obesity as a contagious sickness cue similar to influenza (Tapp et al 2020 ).…”