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Can Body Shaming Be Outlawed?

Whatever progress has been made, prejudice against the overweight has hardly been eliminated. Four years ago, researchers at Harvard published a study in the journal Psychological Science that looked at data from four million tests taken between 2004 and 2016 examining long-term changes in attitude toward historically marginalized groups. The study found that while explicit bias against the overweight had decreased by 15 percent, this represented a much slower decline than similar shifts in attitude toward gays and lesbians, where the figure was 49 percent. This may be because, unlike race or sexual orientation, weight is thought of as mutable. The only barrier to losing it, presumably, is…

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