Visual perception of group fatness as a precursor to social identity threat and safety

Across two studies (N = 190), we evaluate how fat people perceive groups of bodies and how this visual processing predicts social identity threat and safety. We examined how fat people ensemble code–rapidly and simultaneously extract visual information from a group–body size from groups of bodies. Stimuli included sets of 3-d modeled bodies varying in body mass index (BMI; Study 1) and real photographs of groups of people with known BMI (Study 2). As hypothesized, we found that fat people were generally accurate at ensemble coding the average body size of arrays after 500 ms exposure, and that, particularly among fat people with medium and high stigma consciousness, arrays of increasing average BMI were associated with heightened feelings of identity safety. Our work suggests that the representation of fatness in one’s environment may be an important precursor to social identity threat and safety processes.