Not Everybody Likes the Thin and Despises the Fat: One's Weight Matters in the Automatic Activation of Weight-Related Social Evaluations

Four independent studies are presented that investigated the automatic evaluation of overweight and normal weight stimuli in a masked affective priming procedure using pictures of normal weight and overweight persons as prime stimuli. In contrast to other studies that did not find relations between participants' weight and their level of prejudice toward overweight targets, we consistently found a negative relationship between the masked affective priming effect (denoting relative negativity of overweight as compared to normal weight stimuli) and the body mass index of participants, with overweight participants even showing a reversed priming effect (i.e., denoting relative positivity of overweight). In accordance with other studies, no such relation was found in explicit attitude expression. Possible explanations are discussed at a theoretical as well as methodological level.