Before getting into today's episode, we just want to mention that we will be discussing dieting and disordered eating.

Welcome to Overtink. The podcast where two philosophy professors connect big ideas with everyday life.

I'm your co-host, Dr. David Pena-Gusman.

And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

David, one thing I was really struck by is a Harvard study in 2019 showing that fat phobia is the only form of implicit bias they studied that has gotten

worse since 2007. These researchers who started studying implicit bias back in 2007 investigated

race, skin tone, sexual orientation, age, disability, and body weight. And they found that the implicit bias

around body weight is the only one that's gotten worse since they started their study. In fact,

the majority of people still harbored explicit anti-fat biases at the end of the study in 2016.

So not only has this implicit bias towards fat people gotten worse since 2007, for a majority of the study in 2016. So not only has this implicit bias towards fat people gotten

worse since 2007, for a majority of the study participants, it's not just implicit. It's actually

explicit. Yeah, so much for all those fantasies that we liberals like to entertain about the

inevitability of social progress with time, right? The idea that people get increasingly

included in our circle of moral concern, this gives us recent to think that maybe that's not

the way things usually go down. Yeah, and our interviewee of the day, Kate Mann, talks about

this in her book on shrinking, which we're going to be speaking to her about

at length a bit later. But she notes that this study really reveals how it's also a fantasy

that contact with members of a marginalized group reduces the biases that they face from the rest

of the population. Because she notes that nearly three quarters of Americans are classified as

overweight or obese,

according to BMI charts.

Yeah, and I mean, BMI by itself is just such a bogus concept.

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