Social Psychology

Prayer, Weight Stigmatization, and Scientific Faith and their Social Psychology
The ironic effects of weight stigma
In summary, this experiment evaluated the extent to which exposure to negative sentiment toward obesity, a social identity threat, affects that person’s subsequent calorie intake, confidence, and self-reported self-efficacy for controlling their diet. The experimenters’ hypothesis, based on research done previously, was that exposure to weight-stigmatizing would “cause overweight individuals, but not non-overweight individuals to: (1) consume more calorie-rich snack foods, (2) feel less able to control their diet and (3) be more concerned about being a target of weight stigma” (Major et al., 75). That is to say that the effects of stigmatizing obesity would have the ironic effect of leading already overweight women to feel less in control of their own diet and actually consume more calories, effectively making their condition more severe. This hypothesis is based on current research that shows people become stressed when exposed to social identity threats, and experience greater executive demands which would mean they are less able to control their dietary intake. The hypothesis did not discuss the effect on non-overweight women except to predict there would not be a change in these factors. One important factor of this research is that it differentiates between women who perceive themselves to be overweight in contrast to those who are objectively considered overweight.
The study focused exclusively on women, since women are “stigmatized at lower weights than males” (Major et al., 75). This helps to broaden the pool of women who perceive themselves as overweight. Both overweight and non-overweight women par...

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...rent research, and drew conclusions based on the results they gathered. Though the studies differed significantly in content, they utilize the scientific method to obtain accurate, interpretable information that can be used in the future to gain more in-depth knowledge of the subject.

Works Cited
Farias, Miguel; Newheiser, Anna-Kaisa; Kahane, Guy; de Toledo, Zoe. “Scientific faith: Belief in science increases in the face of stress and existential anxiety.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 49 (2014): 1210-1213. Print.
Friese, Malte; Wänke, Michaela. “Personal prayer buffers self-control depletion.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 51 (2014): 56-59. Print.
Major, Brenda; Hunger, Jeffrey M.; Bunyan, Debra P., Miller, Carol T. “The ironic effects of weight stigma.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 51(2014): 74-80. Print.