Research suggests that people who are overweight or obese tend to be stereotyped as lazy, less intelligent and less efficient. But do these biases "leak out" in subtle ways in our daily interactions with overweight people?
That’s what Jennesa Shapiro, an assistant professor of human relations and organizational behavior at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, set out to determine when she dispatched shoppers of average weight and then wearing fat suits to a store in a shopping mall to observe how they were treated by the store’s customer service agents in terms of eye contact, whether they smiled at the customer and whether they were friendly or rude.
To monitor the interaction between shoppers and agents and give their own observations, other "customers" were sent into the stores. The shoppers, who followed a specific script, also carried hidden tape recorders.
While no one was refused service, the overweight shoppers as well as the observers found there were subtle differences in the way customer service agents treated them. And the tape-recorded conversations also verified this. "In general, overweight shoppers received more of this interpersonal hostility," said Shapiro.
Shapiro, who focuses her research on modern forms of discrimination that emerge in organizational contexts and how stereotypes can undermine performance, tried out other scenarios. She dressed the same shoppers — again of average weight and then wearing a fat suit — in casual clothes and professional outfits to see if giving customer service agents a cue that would justify a stereotype would elicit different interpersonal behaviors.
To find out what happened, see the UCLA Anderson video above.
