McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Hearing that Kourtney Kardashian’s boyfriend wants her to lose her baby weight faster, you might think it’s awful and that you don’t agree with it, but the constant exposure to these stories may change your so-called “implicit bias,” making you feel more negative about weight-related issues.
“When you look at a headline and think, ‘This is terrible,’ that is your explicit attitude. Implicit attitude is whether you think something is good or bad,” explained the study’s senior author, Jennifer Bartz, an associate professor of psychology at McGill University.
Bartz said that implicit attitudes can be affected even when you don’t think they are. “Implicit attitudes are generally thought to be built up over a lifetime. We constantly receive messages that things are good or bad, and the more we hear them, the stronger the association is,” she explained. Your implicit reaction tends to be a split-second response.
The impact of fat-shaming may be far-reaching because nearly three-quarters of Americans are
