An Attribution-Value Model of Prejudice: Anti-Fat Attitudes in Six Nations

Abstract

The authors propose an Attribution-Value model of prejudice, which hypothesizes that people are prejudiced against groups that they feel have some negative attribute for which they are held responsible. The structure of prejudice against fat people was compared in six nations: Australia, India, Poland, Turkey, the United States of America, and Venezuela. Both a negative cultural value for fatness and a tendency to hold people responsible predicts anti-fat prejudice. Most important, a multiplicative hypothesis was supported—people with both a negative value for fatness and a tendency to hold people responsible were more anti-fat than could be predicted from cultural value and attributions alone. These effects were more pronounced in individualist cultures. The authors develop the Attribution-Value model of prejudice that can apply to prejudice of many sorts across many cultures.