According to Slate: Male jurors are more likely to find fat women guilty.
A team of Yale psychologists released a study indicating that male jurors were more likely to hand a guilty verdict to obese women than to slender women.
The researchers described to them a case of check fraud to pretend jurors.
They also presented subjects with one of four images— either a large guy, a lean guy, a large woman, or a lean woman — and identified the person in the photograph as the defendant.
Participants rated the pretend-defendant’s guilt on a five-point scale.
Bad news: the male pretend jurors were “significantly more likely” to find the obese female defendants — rather than the slim ones — guilty,
Real bad news: trim male participants were most biased, frequently labeling the fat women defendants “repeat offenders” even though no info was given past offenses.
Good news: no fat bias emerged when the female pretend peers evaluated the female pretend defendants or when either men or women assessed the guilt of the men.
What’s going on?
One hypothesis posed by the researchers is that the “stereotypes about obese people paint them as greedy, selfish, and thus prone to defrauding checks.”
Other post-survey explanations cited for the gender-weight bias:
- Being fat signals impaired impulse control … probably can’t resist committing crimes
- Being fat is, in itself, morally wrong … and a morally wrong person is more likely to commit a crime.
- Fat women are generally unhappier with their lot in life and thus more likely to engage in deviant behavior.
Sounds to me like the skinny guys are just putting their little thumbs on the scale of justice.
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