Prejudice Against Fat People

In the current society, the perception of most people dyed in the wool, that fat people are ugly, lazy, unattractive and sweaty. Those few extra pounds are no longer a personal matter to be sighed over in the privacy of the bedroom. They are a social problem which, it is said, need to be worked off together.

Speaking from my own experience, we can often see such incidents in the MRT train. I once saw there was a big sized guy, almost twice my size was sitting on one of empty seat in the train. Due to his big size, he almost occupied two seats, leaving a tiny space for other passenger. During that time, it was the peak period( after working hour), everyone looked tired and frustrated of having to squeeze with so many passengers. Then, few of the passengers started to give him a 'dirty look' and kept staring at him from head to toe which made him so uncomfortable. Then, there was a young adult who was standing in front of him, covered her nose with a frustrated face due to the smell of that guy's odour. What happened next was that big sized guy immediately alight at the next station without looking back.

One reason why prejudice against fat people is stigmatizing in our society or even in Singapore is because people especially new generation place great importance on physical appearance. They tend to have a certain perceptions of the outgroup and give certain treament to them because they are so called 'not the same' as the ingroup in terms of appearance and those in the out-group are more similar to each other ( although that is not always the truth). Individual tend to judge another individual based on first impression or the use of schemas for the fat people and social categorization. This is happening even in a love relationship eg. love at first sight. Do you really think what first capture/attracts a guy/girl's heart is the personality of the opposite sex, and not based on the appearance? Personally, I don't think so. Although when you asked that individual what you first like about him/her and usually he or she will replied by " Oh, I like him not because of his look, but because he's such a caring guy". Yes, maybe that guy is really caring towards the girl but we need time to get to know our partner well before we could label him as caring. Therefore, the first impression is usually based on appearance. This is something like modern racism where people learned to hide their prejudiced attitudes in order to avoid being labeled as racist where people outwardly act unprejudiced while inwardly maintain prejudiced attitudes.

For many of the growing numbers of people who are overweight or obese, the immediate battle remains not one of losing pounds, but of fighting for acceptance from the society. One of the ways to stop prejudice against fat people is is to redefine or break down the ingroup/outgroup boundaries. We should discourage categorization and encourage personalization and if there is categorization, we should accept them and treat them with mutual respect, and not to treat them differently.

Office Politics

In an office environment, I can see a lot of corporate act, what I meant is not those corporate governance or legislations, but the “Act” that each and every of my colleagues portrayed in the office. Office politics is unavoidable and it happens everywhere. Colleagues in the same department backstab each other, people who like to act smart and hardworking in front of bosses or big shots in order to climb up the corporate ladder, shooting arrows (means pushing blames and responsibilities to each other when some issues crop up) and the worst thing you don’t even know who is treating you sincerely as a friend in the office. Of course no doubt that out of 10 colleagues, there might be one or two who are nice ones, but I think it’s very very rare. I often heard people saying to me "Don't trust people easily in the office, you won't know who is going to backstab you any moment." Somewhat this is true cause I experienced this before and because of this, I learnt to be somewhat 'smart' in handling my colleagues. For example, smile and be nice even to the people that I hate to the core in office or agree with whatever they said even though I find their arguments are ridiculous because I dont want to face the risk of them gossip or talk behind my back. Sometimes, I find myself very contradicting and hate the way I behave sometimes.

Today one of my best friends who works in an engineering company as an accountant shared her work frustrations with me. This is what she said “I buay song the ppl here.. and they also buay song me la.. and i really dont understand the few of them.. rather use the normal working hour to sleep and msning.. and then stay back to do OT.. and so love to ‘por’ each other.. treat each other so good but last time still tell me bad things about each other ”….

Before that, she was a happy go lucky girl who excel in her studies during her university days and was awarded first class honour student recently. However, ever since she joined the working world, everything has changed. She felt lonely in her company, felt sick to come to work and even thinking of taking fake MCs once a month. She was demoralized and lonely because her colleagues would usually ignored or treat her as if she's invisible and gave her a ‘not so friendly treatment’. Her colleagues also often hold gatherings or any birthday/farewell/welcome party without her. Her boss is not supportive and even commented that she finds my friend to be self-centered. And this lead to her having the urge of having tattoo or having her ear pierced because she claimed that these will give her POWER and she will feel more confident. She is hopeless and doesn’t know how to overcome these problems. And because of the situation she is facing at work right now, she started to have self-perception of herself. She started to think that maybe she's not friendly enough or didnt make an extra effort to gel with them. She also started to think that she's a weirdo and often told us that sometimes she wishes to disappear from this world and often 'cursing' herself to get some kind of illness so that she doesn't need to come to work. This lead to low self-esteem and low self-confidence in herself. Self-perception theory (Bem, 1972) proposes that individuals come to "know" their own attitudes and other internal states partially by inferring them from observation of their own overt behaviour. This is what my friend did.

I understand it's painful to be in this kind of situation but to make things better since my friend needs the job badly, she should try to be more open up with her colleagues and supervisor. Discuss the problem she is facing right now and try to find solutions to solve these problems instead of thinking of those negative things as this is really affecting her badly. She can engage more in the activities that she likes to make herself more relax and happy.

According to self-determination theory by Deci & Ryan (1985), it is a person's innate needs for competence, autonomy and relateness. This is what's happening to me and my supervisor. Recently, I'm in charge of a major initiatives which I feel I am competent and up to the task and that initiative is something that interest me as well. However, my supervisor is really getting on my nerves. She wants to meet me weekly for review to have updates on what I plan to do and how am I going to perform the task. I am already so busy with my BAU ( Business as Usual) work and yet she wants to spend two hour weekly with me to talk on the things that I need some time to work on it. She should let me do it independently with her guidance of course but not have total control of it. She even wants to scan through the email that I'm going to send. As the result, I am not motivated at all and felt like a student reporting to the discipline teacher.

Rapid changes

In Singapore, things change really fast that some people cant keep track anymore. Overnight, two-way streets become one-way ones, HDBs upgraded and re-painted regularly, condos was built in open fields within months and in a year, normal phone card become obsolete. I remembered once my sis came to Singapore and she wanted to use the phone card that she bought a year ago to make a phone call back to Malaysia. She failed to make the call and was puzzled because the public phone was rejecting her phone card. I approached her and told her that the phone card that she was holding it cant be used anymore. They have changed the phone cards to the chip cards which will only be accepted by all the public phones. The only reaction she gave me was, "Wah, I only bought it last year and so fast they have change it!"


Sometimes when I visited the old folk's home, the old folks there never fail to get nostalgic. " I used to play hide-and-seek in that playground", one of the old folks would said. The playground in the past has now changed to a newly built building. This is also what we call self-reference effects, even though these old folks are old, they are able to recall these memories better because these memories relate to themselves. We may want to have new changes in life but we also need touchstones of the past to keep ourselves rooted, and give us a sense of personal history. For most of us , this touchstones is often related to places or building. For example, that playground remind the old folks of herself as a cheerful and energetic young little girl that used to run around and play hide-and-seek with her childhood friends. But with Singapore changing so rapidly, so many of these touchstones have been lost. It is diffcult to feel a sense of belonging if, for example, you cannot take your kids back to your old playground and say," Here's where mummy chipped my front tooth". Because of this nostalgia chink in our modern armour, no wonder people are willing to pay $1.30 for a cup of Yakun's coffee , not because their coffee is super tasty but because of the cup that they use as people will start to reminiscing good old days.

Since memory is reconstructive, present beliefs about ourselves can influence what we recall from the personal past depending on your self-schemas (Markus, 1977) and motivation (Sanitioso, Kuna & Fong, 1990).

In this changing world, the most precious commodity that you can trade in is nostalgia.