The skinny on unhappiness: Location is everything

By Meagan M. Taylor

If you find yourself feeling bad about your weight, it might be your neighbors’ fault.

This is one of the conclusions reached by a new University of Colorado Boulder research study, which looked at the impact of social context on the link between life satisfaction and obesity.



“The effects of obesity can be social,” explains Philip Pendergast, a graduate research assistant in the department of sociology, who co-authored the study with associate professor Tim Wadsworth. “Stigma has a psychological effect, so it might not be people’s bodies that are making them unhappy, but the social stigma, or people viewing themselves as different than those around them, that causes them to be unhappy.”

While the link between obesity and unhappiness has been well-researched, Wadsworth and Pendergast set out to explore the mechanism of how obesity causes emotional dissatisfaction. They speculated that the condition of being obese itself might not cause as much angst as the comparisons people make to others around them.

To test their theory, the researchers culled data from 2,353 counties across the United States, comprising a sample of 1.3 million people who were asked, “In general, how satisfied are you with your life?” They controlled for variables that affect life satisfaction—such as race, income and marital status.

They found that in low-obesity counties, there is a 79-percent gap in life satisfaction between non-obese and severely obese men. But that gap does not appear in counties with high obesity rates.

So women are not universally comparing themselves to Heidi Klum but, like men, looking at those around them. The researchers point out that this pattern of social comparison could contribute to rising obesity rates across the United States.For women, the life-satisfaction gap is reduced by 60 percent when moving from non-obese to obese counties. Essentially, people are more satisfied with their lives when their bodies look like their neighbors’.

As an example of how location affects a person’s view of his or her body, Wadsworth points to Boulder.

“In Boulder, you have all these ex-Olympians running around who are trim and fit,” he says. “An obese person in Boulder is going to have one interpretation of their obesity, whereas in St. Louis, where more of the population is obese, they will have a different interpretation.”

The study results support the well-known theory of reference groups, which contends that people interpret their own lives by referring to other people. Consequently, people derive their sense of satisfaction with life based on comparisons with others who they view as “like” them.



Wadsworth, an expert in life-satisfaction and happiness research, says he became interested in reference-group theory after reading social-psychology and economics studies. Economists debate whether the effect of income on happiness is absolute or relative, i.e.—is your satisfaction derived directly from how much money you have, or how much you have compared to everyone else?

“I’m interested in how the process of social comparison influences how other characteristics of our lives affect our happiness,” Wadsworth says.

So if you are a skinny person moving to a high-obesity county, will you feel smug? Probably not, says Wadsworth. Results from the study showed that normal-weight people living in high-obesity counties reported less satisfaction with their lives than those in low-obesity counties.

“Why do they become less satisfied? I would argue that their non-obesity is no longer a benefit—no longer viewed as a successful achievement that fits with normative expectations the way it would be in a place like Boulder,” Wadsworth says.

In fact, the shrinking gap in life satisfaction between obese and normal-weight individuals was not primarily due to obese people becoming more satisfied, but to normal-weight people becoming less satisfied when living in counties with higher rates of obesity. This was especially true for women, Wadsworth says.

“Context is especially influential for non-obese women,” Wadsworth says. “Non-obese women moving to obese counties are losing the life satisfaction benefit of being non-obese.”

While obese women generally pay a higher cost in life satisfaction, given the media focus on women and body image, the researchers were surprised to find that location actually regulates the effect of stigma (or comparison) for women.

“We thought obesity itself would carry a higher negative effect on women’s life satisfaction across any context,” Pendergast says. “But once we looked at county, more or less the same process was happening for men and women.”

So women are not universally comparing themselves to Heidi Klum but, like men, looking at those around them. The researchers point out that this pattern of social comparison could contribute to rising obesity rates across the United States.

“If we are finding that obese people pay less of an emotional cost when they look like other people around them, it’s possible that obesity spreads through social networks,” Pendergast says. “As more people become obese, then there is less of an emotional cost over time to being obese.”

If comparison contributes to the obesity epidemic, or general dissatisfaction, Wadsworth suggests we stop trying to keep up with the Joneses.

“In many ways, we are social creatures, and not comparing ourselves to others is impossible,” Wadsworth says of flat-out ignoring the neighbors. “But the degree to which we can see the emotional reaction caused by comparison may encourage us to compare ourselves to others less frequently. Such self-awareness can have a liberating effect.”

Meagan Taylor is a CU-Boulder alumna and freelance writer in Boulder, Colorado.

 June 25, 2014