Self-identified Obese People Request Less Money: A Field Experiment

Abstract

Empirical evidence suggests that obese people are discriminated in different social environments, such as the work place. Yet, the degree to which obese people are internalizing and adjusting their own behavior as a result of this discriminatory behavior has not been thoroughly studied. We develop a proxy for measuring experimentally the "self-weight bias" by giving to both self-identified obese (n = 90) and non-obese (n = 180) individuals the opportunity to request a positive amount of money after having performed an identical task. Consistent with the System Justification Theory, we find that self-identified obese individuals, due to a preexisting false consciousness, request significantly lower amounts of money than non-obese ones. A within subject comparison between self-reports and external monitors' evaluations reveals that the excessive weight felt by the "self" but not reported by evaluators captures the self-weight bias not only for obese but also for non-obese individuals. Linking our experimental results to the supply side of the labor market, we argue that self-weight bias, as expressed by lower salary requests, enhances discriminatory behavior against individuals who feel, but may not actually be, obese and consequently exacerbates the wage gap across weight.

Keywords: discrimination; in-group devaluation; obesity; system justification theory; wage-gap; weight-bias.

Figure 1

Money requests histogram. Distribution of subjects' money requests. The zero category includes also the 23 subjects who did not make any request (blank repsonse). X-axis value-intervals has been shortcuted for values more than 300. The open interval ≥ 18000 includes all remaining (4) extreme values.

Figure 2

Mean requests and 6cat_requests by self-reported obesity level. (A) Requests refer to the original variable (excluding outliers for requests ≥ 18000, n = 265). Yellow bars: 95% confidence interval. (B) 6cat_requests is a 6-value ordinal transformation of the original variable (n = 269). The size of the bubble is proportional to the number of individuals in that category.

Figure 3

Predicted probabilities for each category of 6cat_requests by self-obese. Ordered Probit predictions of 6cat_requests calculated for self-obese (red dash-framed bars) and non-obese (green bars) separately after having fixed all other predictors at their mean value.

Figure 4

Mean requests and 6cat_requests by obesity level and gender. (A) Requests refer to the original variable (outliers are excluded). Yellow bars: 95% confidence interval. (B) 6cat_requests is a 6-categorical ordinal variable. Red dash-framed bubbles correspond to females and blue ones refer to males. The size of the bubble is proportional to the number of individuals in that category.

Figure 5

Requests by self-weight (≥ 4) and weight overstatement. Self-weight is considered overstated when self-report>monitor-report (red dash-framed bars). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. Self-weight = 7 has been eliminated due to minor number of observations in the respective categories.