Department of Political Science, 1541 Lilac Lane, 504 Blake Hall, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 66044, USA.
Department of Political Science, 1541 Lilac Lane, 504 Blake Hall, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 66044, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2019 Feb;223:97-103. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.01.019. Epub 2019 Jan 19.
Although obesity represents a potential public health crisis, our understanding of public perceptions of obesity, emotional responses to the obese, and related policy preferences is limited.
We employed Weiner's attribution theory of controllability (Weiner, 1988, 2011) to examine perceived causes of obesity, emotional responses, and related policy implications. If the perceived cause is controllable (eating and lifestyle habits), we expected less sympathy and greater anger toward obese people and support for prejudicial hiring policies based on weight. If the cause is perceived as uncontrollable (genetic), sympathy is anticipated as well as opposition to such hiring policies.
We conducted multivariate analyses with data from two nationally representative surveys of U.S. adults.
Our findings supported the hypotheses, showing that sympathy and lack of anger toward obese people are strongly determined by a genetic attribution for obesity. Moreover, sympathy and the genetic attribution are significant predictors of opposition to hiring policies that discriminate against obese people. Finally, in a second study, chief among several causal attributions for obesity-lack of will power, lack of exercise, marketing of foods, and genetics-we discovered biological attribution functions as the key predictor of perceptions that obese people are frequent targets of discrimination. We suggest governments and the food industry should be more attuned to the underlying beliefs of the public about the causes of obesity when formulating programs and policies to address the issue.
尽管肥胖代表了一种潜在的公共健康危机，但我们对公众对肥胖的看法、对肥胖者的情绪反应以及相关政策偏好的理解是有限的。
我们运用韦纳的可控制归因理论（Weiner，1988，2011）来检验肥胖的感知原因、情绪反应和相关政策影响。如果感知原因是可控的（饮食和生活习惯），我们预计对肥胖者的同情会减少，愤怒会增加，并支持基于体重的偏见雇佣政策。如果原因被认为是不可控的（遗传），则预计会产生同情，同时反对这种基于体重的雇佣政策。
我们对来自两项美国成年人全国代表性调查的数据进行了多元分析。
我们的研究结果支持了假设，表明对肥胖者的同情和缺乏愤怒主要取决于肥胖的遗传归因。此外，同情和遗传归因是反对歧视肥胖者的雇佣政策的重要预测因素。最后，在第二项研究中，在肥胖的几个主要归因（缺乏意志力、缺乏锻炼、食品营销和遗传）中，我们发现生物归因是肥胖者经常成为歧视目标的感知的关键预测因素。我们建议政府和食品行业在制定解决这一问题的计划和政策时，应更加关注公众对肥胖原因的潜在信念。
