Separated at girth: Kids in study prefer slenderness

9- to 11-year-olds tested show plumpness bias

Children might develop an implicit bias against overweight and obese people early in childhood that leads them to make quick judgments based only on size, a small experiment suggests.

The study tested snap judgments made by youngsters ages 9 to 11 right after they had seen pictures of children with varied body shapes.

Participants were briefly shown pictures of older children who were similar to one another in age, race and sex but of different weights. Right after that, they briefly viewed images of meaningless fractals and were asked to rate these abstract geometric patterns as “good” or “bad.”

After seeing pictures of healthyweight children, the participants gave 64 percent of the fractals a good rating, compared with just 59 percent of the fractals they saw after looking at overweight children.

If the participants had no implicit weight bias, researchers would expect them to rate half the fractals good and the other half bad, the study authors say. A difference in the proportion of good ratings after pictures of healthy weight versus overweight children, however, indicates implicit bias.

“What’s surprising here is that the bias is similar to that seen for race and shows us that even kids already have strong preferences based on weight,” said lead study author Asheley Cockrell Skinner of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

The difference in percentages of “good” fractal ratings — that is, the degree of young participants’ implicit bias — depended on how much the participants themselves weighed.

Beyond its small size, other limitations of the study include its group of mostly white, affluent participants recruited from a single location, the authors note. This might mean the results would be different in a more diverse group of children.

Parents can influence the issue, however, said Dr. Anne McTiernan, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

“Parents should teach their children to be accepting of people of all sizes,” McTiernan, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email. “They can also screen for images their children see on TV and on the Internet.”

They should also lead by example, said Justin Ryder, a pediatrics researcher at the University of Minnesota Medical School who wasn’t involved in the study.

“Using terms like fat, unhealthy, lazy, bad, ugly, etc. in reference to a person struggling with being overweight or obese is likely to build a negative attitude toward that people of that body shape over time,” Ryder said by email. “Parents likely do not realize their own implicit bias towards persons who are overweight or obese, making this a challenge.”