Self-discrimination: A field experiment on obesity

While it is well-established in the literature that obese people are discriminated against in the working environment, little is known about their own actual behavior. Our experimental setting investigates whether these potentially discriminated people respond in a different way when faced with the opportunity of earning a positive amount of money. Significant lower money requests by obese people confirm our self-discrimination hypothesis, offering an additional explanation for the wage gap; Thus, it seems that obese people earn less not only because of discrimination against them but also because they themselves are less demanding. Two different explanations are suggested obese people request less due to self-esteem vulnerability and/or due to some kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Results are not confirmed when applying the same approach to "beauty" and "gender", two features that are also often associated with wage discrimination.