Children's stereotypes of overweight children

The aim of the present study was to assess the content, favourability and generality of perceptions held about overweight children. The research also addressed whether anti-fat biases change with age and whether they result from a strong association between overweight and bad behaviour, a weak association between overweight and good behaviour or both. Seventy-three 5- to 10-year-olds were read aloud a number of short stories containing characters demonstrating high and low athletic, academic, artistic and social abilities. They were then shown eight different pairs of cards; each pair comprised a drawing of an average-weight and an overweight version of the same child. Participants were then asked to point to the pictures that looked most like the good and bad characters in the stories. The results demonstrated that 5- to 8-year-olds were significantly less likely to choose an overweight picture to represent the characters with high athletic, academic, artistic and social ability. In contrast, 9- to 10-year-olds were significantly less likely to choose an overweight figure to represent the characters with high athletic ability, did not differentiate on the basis of weight for the academic and artistic stories, and were significantly more likely to choose an overweight picture as having high social ability