Culture, health, and bigotry: How exposure to cultural accounts of fatness shape attitudes about health risk, health policies, and weight-based prejudice.

RATIONALE: We conducted three experiments to examine how cultural frames shape attitudes about health, focusing on obesity, which is considered a public health crisis and is imbued with symbolic meaning. METHODS: College students (Ns = 99, 114, and 293) read news articles that presented high body weight according to one or more of the following frames: 1) public health crisis; 2) personal responsibility; 3) health at every size (HAES); or 4) fat rights. RESULTS: Compared to people who read the HAES and Fat Rights articles, those who read the Public Health Crisis and Personal Responsibility articles expressed more belief in the health risks of being fat (ds = 1.28 to 1.79), belief that fat people should pay more for insurance (ds = 0.53 to 0.71), anti-fat prejudice (ds = 0.61 to 0.69), willingness to discriminate against fat people (ds = 0.41 to 0.59), and less willingness to celebrate body-size diversity (ds = 0.77 to 1.07). They were less willing to say women at the lower end of the obese range could be healthy. Exposure to these articles increased support for price-raising policies to curb obesity but not support for redistributive or compensatory policies. In Experiment 3, in comparison to a control condition, exposure to HAES or Fat Rights frames significantly reduced beliefs in the risks of obesity and support for charging fat people more for insurance. However, only people exposed to the Fat Rights frame expressed fewer anti-fat attitudes and more willingness to celebrate body-size diversity. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that simply disseminating information that people can be both fat and healthy will not suffice to reduce prejudice. Given that anti-fat stigma is a health risk and barrier to collective solidarity, fat rights viewpoints can buffer against the negative consequences of anti-fat stigma and promote a culture of health by fostering empathy and social justice.

Reporting risk, producing prejudice: how news reporting on obesity shapes attitudes about health risk, policy, and prejudice.

News reporting on research studies may influence attitudes about health risk, support for public health policies, or attitudes towards people labeled as unhealthy or at risk for disease. Across five experiments (N = 2123) we examined how different news framings of obesity research influence these attitudes. We exposed participants to either a control condition, a news report on a study portraying obesity as a public health crisis, a news report on a study suggesting that obesity may not be as much of a problem as previously thought, or an article discussing weight-based discrimination. Compared to controls, exposure to the public health crisis article did not increase perception of obesity-related health risks but did significantly increase the expression of antifat prejudice in four out of seven comparisons. Across studies, compared to controls, participants who read an article about weight-based discrimination were less likely to agree that overweight constitutes a public health crisis or to support various obesity policies. Effects of exposure to an article questioning the health risks associated with overweight and obesity were mixed. These findings suggest that news reports on the "obesity epidemic" - and, by extension, on public health crises commonly blamed on personal behavior - may unintentionally activate prejudice.

Social problem construction and national context: news reporting on "overweight" and "obesity" in the United States and France.

Drawing on analyses of American and French news reports on "overweight" and "obesity," this article examines how national context­including position in a global field of nation states, as well as different national politics and culture­shapes the framing of social problems. As has been shown in previous research, news reports from France­the economically dominated but culturally dominant nation of the two­discuss the United States more often than vice versa, typically in a negative way. Our contribution is to highlight the flexibility of anti-American rhetoric, which provides powerful ammunition for a variety of social problem frames. Specifically, depending on elite interests, French news reports may invoke anti-American rhetoric to reject a given phenomenon as a veritable public problem, or they may use such rhetoric to drum up concern over an issue. We further show how diverse cultural factors shape news reporting. Despite earlier work showing that a group-based discrimination frame is more common in the United States than in France, we find that the U.S. news sample is no more likely to discuss weight-based discrimination than the French news sample. We attribute this to specific barriers to this particular framing, namely the widespread view that body size is a behavior, akin to smoking, rather than an ascribed characteristic, like race. This discussion points, more generally, to some of the mechanisms limiting the diffusion of frames across social problems.