Penn Study Claims Obese People Viewed As Less Competent At Work
By Chelsea Karnash
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – It's no secret that being obese has dire consequences for your health, but it could also be affecting your job prospects.
A new study out of the University of Pennsylvania finds that people who are obese or very overweight are often seen as less competent than their thinner peers.
The scientists conducted five experiments to come to their conclusion. For example, in one experiment, participants were asked to view photographs of "Jeopardy!" contestants, rate them for competence and then predict the winner.
While weight had no bearing on who won, contestants regularly deemed the obese subjects less likely to win.
A second experiment asked study participants to look at more than 150 resumes that also included a photo of the "applicant." Some of those photos had been digitally altered to make the candidate look overweight. Again, obese candidates were perceived to be less competent than more svelte applicants.
And thinner people weren't the only ones making unfair judgements -- overweight study participants were just as likely as thinner participants to rate the obese job applicants lower on the competence scale.
One of the study's authors, Wharton professor Maurice Schweitzer, says it's more socially acceptable for people to "fat shame" than it is to make negative remarks about qualities such as race or sex.
"If somebody said that about somebody's race, people would be calling for them to be fired," Schweitzer says. "Yet because many people perceive obesity to be a choice, discrimination against obese people is far more accepted."
The Penn study is published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.