Weight Bias Internalization

Weight stigma typically focuses on suggestions that people with overweight and obesity are incompetent and immoral. Integrating so far unconnected lines of research, the current research presents two studies that examine the motivational relevance of these aspects of weight stigma. Specifically, we tested the proposition that people with overweight and obesity respond differently to the public viewing them as incompetent compared to immoral, as these aspects of weight stigma differ in reparability. We expect that threats to competence are more acceptable and thus related to a constructive response that is more effective in losing weight in the long-run. By contrast, we propose that threats …