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131: Testimony and overweight stigma. Children trust average people more than the overweight as potential sources of new knowledge

The present research frames in the domain of studies about testimony as a source of knowledge. Previous works have shown how children show a selective trust in the information provided by other people depending on their epistemic characteristics (for instance, the degree of knowledge or expertise attributed to the informants). However, there are still very few studies examining the influence of non-epistemic characteristics of the informants, particularly those related to informants´ physical traits. The aim of our research was to deepen in the study of the influence of body size in trustworthiness that children consent to their testimony, focusing on the relationship between the former and the children´s stereotypes and identification processes. Forty-four Spanish children aged 5 and 7 years participated in the study. Three tasks were presented to them. The first one was a labeling task, where children had to endorse new names for unknown objects (6 trials) proposed by two informants that differed in their body sizes (average weight versus overweight). Following a conflicting-claims paradigm, children were asked to choose between the two names suggested by each of the informants. The second task was designed to assess three different aspects of children’s identification related to their body type: self-identification, ideal identification (which figure would you most like to look like?) and negative identification (which figure would you least like to look like?). Finally, the third task assessed children’s body type stereotypes using an adjective attribute task, where they had to assign positive and negative adjectives to figures of the two different body sizes. Results showed selective confidence toward the group not socially stigmatized: children chose more likely average figures than overweight figures as informants (64% of the trials). Regarding identification and stereotype tasks, we found a positive bias toward average figures opposite to the overweight ones, and a weak relationship between these measures and the election of the informant in the labeling task. Psychological and educational implications of these results are discussed.

Author(s):

Irene Solbes    
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Spain

Sonia Garijo    
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Spain

Ileana Enesco    
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Spain