On attitudes toward fat people: Linking lay theories of social norms to explicit attitudes toward violators of norms

Abstract

Individual differences in negative attitudes toward fat people have been linked to variations in beliefs about the controllability of fatness (Crandall, 1994). Although attitudes towards fat people may be influenced by societal standards, little is known with respect to how lay beliefs about social norms may affect attitudes fat people. We suggest that people who believe that social norms are fixed (entity norms theorists) differ from those who believe that social norms are malleable (incremental norms theorists) in their explicit attitudes towards violators of norms. To the extent that expressing opinions incongruent with social norms risks negative consequences, entity norms theorists, who believe that nothing can be done to change social norms, may tend to express a negative attitude toward norms violators. By contrast, incremental norms theorists, who tend to believe that social standards can be negotiated as the society evolves, may feel less pressed express a negative attitude toward norms violators (cf. Chiu et al., 1997). Thus, we hypothesized that entity (versus incremental) norms theorists would display more a negative explicit, though not necessarily implicit, attitude toward fat people, who violate societal standards of appearance. We developed a measure to assess university students’ beliefs about the malleability of social norms. We used the Dislike Subscale of Crandall’s (1994) Antifat Questionnaire and an Implicit Association Test (cf. Greenwald et al., 1999) to measure their explicit and implicit attitudes toward fat people respectively. As expected, entity (versus incremental) norms theorists displayed more explicit, but not implicit, negative attitudes toward fat people.