The effect of weight controllability beliefs on prejudice and self-efficacy
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Psychology, Public Health
- Keywords
- exercise, obesity, prejudice, self-efficacy, weight management
- Copyright
- © 2016 Thorsteinsson et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. The effect of weight controllability beliefs on prejudice and self-efficacy. PeerJ PrePrints 4:e1701v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1701v1
Abstract
An experiment was conducted to test for the presence of prejudice towards obesity and whether weight controllability beliefs information reduces this prejudice and impacts on a person’s own healthy eating self-efficacy. The experiment randomly allocated 346 participants (49 males) into one of three conditions: controllable contributors toward obesity condition (e.g., information about personal control about diet and exercise); uncontrollable contributors toward obesity condition (e.g., information about genes, factors in society); and a control condition with no information given. Prejudice was present in 81% of the sample. High prejudice was predicted by low self-efficacy for exercise and weight. Weight controllability beliefs information had no significant effect on prejudice levels or exercise or healthy eating self-efficacy levels. Increasing self-efficacy for exercise and weight my help reduce prejudice towards obese individuals.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.