Obesity comes with adverse consequences for those affected, including relationship, economic, and health disadvantages. This is, at least partially, because individuals with obesity are frequently confronted with weight stigma. Those adverse consequences are typically viewed as cross-culturally universal (i.e., affecting all individuals to a similar degree, regardless of where they live). We here challenge this perspective. Specifically, we hypothesize (a) that obesity’s adverse consequences are less severe in regions where obesity is prevalent and (b) that this is because of reduced weight bias in these high-obese regions. In Studies 1-2, we use data from the US (Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System; N = 2,842,767 across 2,419 counties) and the UK (BBC Lab Data; N = 180,551 across 378 districts) to show that obesity’s adverse consequences are greatly reduced (or even vanish completely) in high-obese regions. In Study 3, we demonstrate that this reduction of adverse consequences is indeed due to reduced weight bias (Project Implicit; N = 381,956 across 678 US counties). We employed a multiverse approach to check the robustness of our results across 63 additional models, including alternative cut-offs, operationalizations, and various individual and regional control variables. Overall, our findings suggest that obesity’s adverse consequences are partly socially construed (and, thus, not inevitable) and, more broadly, highlight the need to consider regional contexts in psychological research.
