Research On The Effect Of Self-Esteem On Implicit And Explicit Prejudice Toward Overweight People

With the development of social economy, people’s material living standards are being improved, the national quality also has increased. However, although people are in the states of abundance both on material and spiritual life, the social prejudice phenomenon is prevalent.Overweight people experience negative attitudes and discrimination from others. According to Social Identification Theory, when people have intensive identification with ingroup, they will improve self-esteem through the comparison between ingroup and outgroup, that may course prejudice and conflict. Social Comparison Theory believes that when individuals encounter failure or other negative life events, self-esteem will be decreased,and then individuals tend to have downward comparison, in order to preserve their dignity. The purpose of this study is to verify whether students have significant implicit and explicit prejudice toward overweight people, and investigate the effect of implicit and explicit self-esteem of college students on implicit and explicit prejudice toward overweight people. The study randomly sampled 95 China University of Geosciences(Beijing) college students to investigate, data were analyzed by SPSS 16.0. The statistical methods include descriptive statistics analysis, T test analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis, the main results are as follows:First, college students have significant implicit prejudice toward overweight people, but not explicit prejudice; the implicit and explicit prejudice appeared separation, are two distinct constructs;Second, implicit self-esteem has significant effect on implicit prejudice toward overweight people,but not explicit prejudice;Third, explicit and implicit self-esteem appeared separation, are two distinct self-evaluation constructs; explicit self-esteem has no significant effect on implicit and explicit prejudice toward overweight people neither.