Why fat suits do not advance the scientific study of weight stigma

TO THE EDITOR: Although the topic of weight stigma has received increased scholarly attention in recent years, it remains a nascent area of research, with experimental methodologies to discern causal relationships still being explored and developed. However, the recent trend of using “fat suits” in this research, such as in the study by Incollingo Rodriguez et al. (1), raises serious methodological and ethical questions. These suits, which allow lean individuals to take on the appearance of a higher-weight person, may appear on the surface to lend themselves to high-quality experimental studies with the ability to randomize weight status. However, in reality, the response to stigma observed in a thin person wearing a fat suit does not equate to the responses of a genuinely fat person, which occur within the broader context of a pervasive hostile environment. (Note, we use the word “fat” to reflect the preferred terminology of the fat acceptance social justice movement.) It may well be that “weight status per se” is less of a problem than being the target of ubiquitous and insidious mistreatment. Indeed, maladaptive emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses to stigma, including unhealthy eating behaviors, have been consistently demonstrated across a range of stigmatized identities, and chronic actual or perceived stigma is more important in driving these effects than are individual experiences of discrimination or prejudice (2, 3). Furthermore, even in the absence of an explicit discriminatory event, a fat person may well anticipate such stigmatization occurring at any time. A recent randomized controlled study that manipulated stigmatization rather than weight found that expectation of social rejection was causally linked to reduced executive control, lowered self-esteem, increased stress, and emotional and behavioral manifestations of self-consciousness in higher-weight, but not lean, women (4). Additionally, responses to weight stigma among higher-weight individuals will likely be impacted by internalized weight stigma, self-blame and shame, and awareness of subordinate social power and status (5, 6). These components of the lived experience of weight stigma are unlikely to factor into a thin person's experience in a fat suit. As such, a thin person's physiological, affective, and behavioral responses to weight stigma while wearing a fat suit are nonequivalent to those of a fat person in the same situation. Given the numerous and important differences between how a fat person and a thin person wearing a fat suit would experience fatness, the findings from fat suit studies cannot be reliably interpreted. Thus, this method is, in fact, inappropriate for determining causality. Another often cited reason for the use of fat suits in weight stigma research is to reduce antifat prejudice by fostering empathy for higher-weight individuals. However, evidence for the effectiveness of empathy-based interventions to reduce weight stigma is limited at best and may well produce paradoxical effects in a notable proportion of subjects (7), as demonstrated in this study. It appears that some people respond better to this method of prejudice reduction than others, and positive effects will be seen in these individuals using less problematic methods of stimulating empathy. If participants in an empathy-building intervention cannot take the perspective of another person without donning a costume to assume the stigmatized identity, then doing so is unlikely to improve the outcome. Fat suit studies can also be criticized on ethical grounds. A significant body of literature attests to the extensive negative impact of weight stigma and the vast embodied experiences of micro-aggressions, prejudice, and structural discrimination faced by higher-weight individuals (8). The idea that the experiences of a marginalized group must be verified by the privileged in order to be considered legitimate only serves to reinforce and perpetuate the current power structure and constitutes another form of oppression. We cannot “manipulate the experience of obesity,” and attempts to do so devalue the very people whose well-being we purport to defend. The time for weight science to familiarize itself with the body equality and social justice issues inherent in the study of weight stigma is long overdue.

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