Chubby but cheerful? Investigating the compensatory judgments of high, medium, and low status weight groups in an Asian culture.

We examined two strategies that people use in their social judgements—indifference and compensation. Given the average position of members of intermediate-status groups, we reasoned that an indifference strategy would characterise perceivers’ competence vs. warmth judgements of these people because they do not possess features that deviate from normality. In contrast, high- and low-status groups deviate from normality, and we reasoned that attention to the negative aspects of their competence vs. warmness should enlist a complementary desire to compensate such groups on the opposite dimension, in line with societal norms of politeness. We tested these ideas in relation to people who were underweight (intermediate-status group), overweight (low-status group) and ideal weight (high-status group). Results from Study 1 showed that compensation was used for underweight faces and ideal weight faces, while an indifference strategy was used in the judgements of overweight faces, which we reasoned may be tied to cultural and individual differences. When these noise variables were removed in Studies 2a and 2b, we showed that, consistent with our assumptions, the indifference strategy was used in the evaluations of underweight people, and compensation was used for the ideal and overweight categories. Finally, Study 2b showed that norms of politeness predicted the use of compensation, but only for the overweight category.