Crandall, C., Nierman, A., & Hebl, M., « Anti-fat prejudice » (469-487) in Nelson, Todd (ed), the handbook of Prejudcien dscrimination and streotyping, Taylor & Francis: New York, 2009
Introduction
The chapter 23, “Anti-fat Prejudice” is focused on stereotypes in social psychology. Indeed, Leyens (1984) defined it as an implicit personality theory that group member share about other people. Stereotypes can contain positive or negative beliefs about characteristics of social groups. This chapter relies on negative belief about heavyweight people, who are discriminated. Today, we live in a society, which impose people to get thinner, like fashion models. This chapter is aimed to everyone whom are interested about the subject and especially social psychologists.
Summary
About the book
This is a handbook about prejudices, stereotyping, and discrimination written by Todd Neslon (2009). Chapter 23 is about anti-fat prejudice, in this chapter we choose to work on the extract 3, which focuses on marriage, relationships and family.
About the chapter 23
Authors wanted to emphasize the fact that anti-fat bias is well explore in public life. Nevertheless, it is less explored in private life. Authors highlights anti fat effects on relationships aspects. He focuses on three mains which are; friendships, dating, and marriage.
First, we learn that heavyweight people are socially marginalized. Indeed, they are more subject to be less popular and less appreciate than learner people. Moreover, people seems to stay with their weight counterparts. Nonetheless, heavyweight individuals are able to balance their appearance by developing social skills. Especially, Miller et al. (1995) had demonstrated that heavyweight women compensate their difference i by chatting with others when they accept their overweight (excess weight).
Accordingly, their social marginalization affects their dating possibilities and sexual relationships (Chen & Brown, 2005). Heavyweight individuals are judged as less attractive than learner individuals. It will be more difficult for overweight’s women to date someone during their youth/adolescence. However, it does not mean that they will never date; it means that it will be slowly and not regularly compare to others (Pearce et al., 2002). Further, their partners are considered less attractive. Overall, these women are struggling to enter into romantic relationship (Regan, 1996). Prejudices against overweight participate in difficulties to engage into romantic relationship.
When it comes to marriage, it is not surprising that according to relationships difficulties, overweight’s people get married later and less often. Indeed, we did not see any difference about satisfaction, conflicts and problems (Frongillo, 1995). Despite this fact, weight is not a success factor of marriage. Besides that, marriage have a defense function against prejudice. It seems that married overweight women feel more protected, therefore, there are happier than unmarried overweight women (Marshall & Neill, 1977). As friendship, leaner people select lean people and overweight people choose their peers to get married.
Critical evaluation
The aim of the chapter was to focus on the consequences of anti-fat bias in the area of private relationships. We think that this aim has been well investigated. Authors relayed on various studies to support the topic. We can consider that their literature review was relevant because those studies were written from 1988 to 2004. They describe the phenomenon in an objective way thanks to their citations. We did not see any subjective point of view. In short, this chapter was written with a scientist approach.
Nonetheless, this abstract does not entirely cover the topic of the title “Marriage, relationships and family”. Indeed, we do not find clearly the family topic. Authors have only broached the marriage topic. According to the title, we thought that the family area and relationship with children would be more develop. It would being interesting to complete this subject.
Furthermore, anti-fat prejudice is mostly associated to women in this study. So, we cannot know if it the same for men or if there is no significant effect for them. In addition, authors do not explain differences between women and men. Thus, maybe we could add that women are already under gender prejudices consequently there are more attacked on their appearance. There is more pressure about their appearance.
This chapter informs people about anti-fat bias. It can raise awareness among the fact that overweight people are not different from learner people. It can lead people to decrease their stereotypes and prejudices against heavyweight people.
Conclusion
To summarize, we retain that heavyweight people come together in their relationships and that overweight women have more difficulties in their relationships. From our social psychological point of view, we identify some theories that could be pointed out to explain these phenomena. First, we can evoke the social categorization’s effect, which can explain the gathering between similar people. Then, we can mention the intersectionality theory, which is an accumulation of stereotypes; gender and appearance. Finally, we can explain the lower prejudices effect against overweight women after marriage by the fact there is less seduction issues whatever our appearance.
Eventually, beyond that there are gender and anti-fat bias, we choose this abstract to explore these stereotypes namely in relationships. In order to complete the reader opinion, it should be relevant to read the entire chapter.
Words we are learned:
- Heavyweight/overweight people : personne en surpoids
- Beyond that : au-delà
- The gathering : l’union, le rassemblement
- Disentangle : enlever
- Not as dismal (…) as : pas si désastreux, si grave, que …
By Grimaud Chloé, Le Squer Clara & Renaud Margot