The National Science Foundation (NSF) is spending nearly $300,000 to study weight stigma, a project where obese people will text researchers to report when they have been mocked because of their size.
The head researcher on the project previously published a scientific paper that assumed Republicans are mean to fat people.
The five-year study theorizes that there is a vicious cycle where obese people eat to deal with weight stigma, gain more weight, and then face more weight stigma.
"Understanding societal stigma is foundational to the science of social psychology," according to the grant for the project. "In an era of historically high obesity prevalence rates, one of the most pervasive and socially acceptable forms of societal stigma is weight stigma."
"What happens to an individual who experiences such stigma?" the project asks.
The grant explains that the researchers will investigate a "comprehensive trio of consequences: increases in psychological stress, increases in comfort eating, and increases in cortisol, a stress hormone that itself can cause eating and fat storage."
"One crucial implication of this research is that these consequences could hinder weight loss efforts, or even result in weight gain - thereby sustaining the originally stigmatized condition," the grant said. "The proposed research will test this premise, and investigate weight outcomes as they relate to experiencing weight stigma."
The project gets underway on Sept. 1, and has cost taxpayers $278,442 so far. Research will continue until August 2020.
The study involves developing a "text-messaging platform" for obese people to "report real-life instances of weight stigma as they experience them in daily life."
"They will then provide cortisol samples and report on their eating behaviors," the grant said. "Over the course of one year, the second study will test whether experiences of weight stigma are followed by increases in stress and cortisol, whether those increases in turn predict unsuccessful weight loss efforts or weight gain, and finally whether those weight outcomes are followed by ever more experiences of weight stigma."
Janet Tomiyama, an assistant professor in the department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is leading the study.
Tomiyama has previously hypothesized that conservatives are prejudiced towards fat people. Her research did not find that to be the case.
In a research paper "It’s not you, it’s me: Self-perceptions, antifat attitudes and stereotyping of obese individuals," Tomiyama premised her research on the idea that white Republicans hold "anti-fat attitudes" with a flow chart.
"Control beliefs in antifat attitudes usually reflect the mutability of weight and perceived lack of willpower in obese targets—the belief that obese individuals became obese through diet-related choices and can control their weight," the paper, co-authored by Tomiyama said. "Because our model focused on self-perceptions, we examined the role of self-based control beliefs (degree to which an individual perceives control over their behavior) in antifat attitudes."
Based on the "personality literature on prejudice," the paper suggested that conservatives would think obese people are "stupid" and "unpleasant."
"The personality literature on prejudice suggests a strong relationship between self-based control beliefs encompassed in Right-Wing Authoritarianism and out-group prejudice," the paper said. "Thus, we hypothesized a positive relationship between self-control beliefs and antifat attitudes."
"Likewise, conservative ideals, beliefs about personal responsibility, and personal control appear interrelated in regard to antifat attitudes, so we included political orientation in our model as a means to separate control beliefs from conservative ideology related to personal responsibility," Tomiyama added. "We hypothesized identifying as conservative (Republican) would be positively predictive of antifat attitudes."
However, science disproved the claim.
"We found no association between identifying as a Republican (a proxy for conservative political ideology) and antifat attitudes," the paper said. "We note our sample of students identifying as Republican was relatively small (11 percent) and political orientation, in this sample, may be particularly subject to parental influence."
"Interpretations of this finding should be made with caution," Tomiyama warned. "We similarly found no association between identifying as White and holding antifat attitudes."
Tomiyama did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Other publications by Tomiyama include: "What does weight stigma smell like?" and "If shaming reduced obesity, there would be no fat people."