Fat chance for a favor: Obese-normal differences in compliance and incidental learning.

Abstract

The behavior of obese individuals has been characterized as stimulus bound. To extend this hypothesis, the effects of manipulations of salient external cues on incidental learning and compliance were tested for overweight and normal subjects. High- or low-potency trigrams were presented incidentally, under conditions of high, low, or no distraction. A significant triple-order interaction for subject weight, cue potency, and distraction was obtained. Subsequently, subjects were asked to comply with the request of a heavy or slim confederate whose behavior had been quite pleasant, neutral, or extremely nasty. Both the weight and behavior of the person making the request had a greater effect on the compliance of overweight subjects than on that of normals. Recent research has established that the eaiting behavior of overweight people is highly responsive to food-relevant environmental cues and is relatively unresponsive to internal visceral cues (Nisbett, 1968; Schachter & Gross, 1968; Schachter, Goldman, & Gordon, 1968). Because it seemed possible that this heightened external responsiveness might also hold for non-food-related stimuli, Rodin, Herman, and Schachter (1974) measured overweight and normal-weight subjects in a number of perceptual tasks that have been assumed to tell something about the likelihood that a stimulus will trigger a response. They found that obese subjects were faster than were normals in choice reaction time and that they had lower tachistoscopic recognition thresholds and better immediate recall for items briefly exposed on a slide. In considering these results, Rodin (1973) reasoned that the overweight subject is stimulus bound and therefore gripped by impinging external cues. Consequently, when a task is salient and no other prominent external stimuli are present, obese subjects perform as well or better than normals. However, distracting irrelevant cues may also compel attention and thus disrupt task performance for the obese. Rodin found