I think there's a lot of just-world fallacy going around re: how I keep running across the following pattern online now that GLP-1RA drugs exist.

Commenter A (esp. often a woman, though of any age): I lost a lot of weight and people treat me radically better. I did not change my behavior in a way that explains this; it seems like stigma / prejudice.

Commenter B: I have never met you but it is probably the case that stigma is not relevant and in fact you did somehow become more confident or otherwise start behaving differently in ways that mean your prior and current experiences of the world were somehow deserved.

Which is kind of wild!

There is a persistent bias, in general and online, against any claim that one's job prospects, social status, overall life satisfaction is dependent on the way people treat you specifically due to your physical appearance. I think this bias has worsened in the recent decade due to how emphatically the affirmative claim is espoused by the incel/looksmaxxer movement, so conceding any ground means "proving them right".

There are certain realities people feel more comfortable denying/de-emphasizing. Another such bias is the impact of innate talent and its connection to success in any field tied to cognitive ability. People don't seem to want to accept that there are differences in ability/faculties that are:

1. Extremely impactful on one's life outcome

2. Extremely hard or impossible to change, especially past adolescence

3. Largely predetermined by genetic differences, many of which are random

One of my favorite examples of this is a transgender woman who worked at Subway (sandwich shop) and wrote about her experience on reddit. Someone posed a question on reddit that was something like "people who have transitioned, how did others treat you differently after the fact." I interpreted the question as how did friends and family react after knowing you previously as one gender and then another, but this trans woman's response on how the general public treated her was much more interesting IMO.

Before she transitioned, as a man she said she'd get lots of compliments and kudos from customers for basically just doing her job at Subway. As a woman, though, people were much more likely to complain and she was rarely complimented, and only if she went "above and beyond" her normal work duties.

The thing I loved about this is that, like the women who lose a lot of weight, she basically "acted as her own control". When it's different men and women you can argue over whether or not people behaved differently, but it's harder to do that (or at least it should be) if it's the same person.

I'm sure being treated nicer by everyone might also increase my confidence tbh. I think the opposite order is more interesting for that though - people who become overweight and notice their coworkers and friends changing how they look at them and so on.

Mild counterpoint: a friend of mine, a professional woman, started on GLP-1 drugs some time ago. She has lost weight, but she also says she's had significant cognitive improvements, more focus, better sleep, etc. It would be great to have research which explicitly teases out these various effects.

I find it amazing people don’t believe this. I lost about 50kg and people treated me better. They didn’t randomly shout ‘fat fuck’ in the street for a start.

So weird to me anyone actually refutes this effect.

I lost weight for two reasons. First was for health, second was for career/being taking seriously in certain social circles (aka networking).

I also went through one of the least confident periods of my life for unrelated reasons right about the time I hit my target goal weight. Debilitating so.

I still got treated better, even when I was barely able to engage in a social interaction. From subtle things I noticed, up towards things that were quite literally spoken out loud and explicit. Just small interactions were less full of friction and low-stakes requests such as solving a problem with a pharmacist tech just seemingly got easier somehow.

And I'm a dude. The impact for women has to be multiples larger.

I'm close to B. In the 80's they tested how appearance affects people. Some women were given a facial scar and went to interviews while others were left as is. The scar group reported higher levels of discrimination than those without the scar. Tricky thing was none of them had scars in the interviews. The women that thought they had the fake scars had a "touch up" and the testers removed it.

Link: https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/what-a-1980s-facial-scar...

Nah I see this as a bald dude. When I wear a cap people smile at me, make conversation, etc

Not when I’m clearly bald though

People treat you better when you look better it’s sad but true

There's 2 sides to this:

1. Halo effect - people treat you better cause you're hot.

2. Confidence effect - you do things you wouldnt have because you now have energy, confidence, and freed up mental capacity from lower food noise.

“Deserved” might not be the right word, or is carrying serious weight.

All I can say from my personal experience is that I’ve noticed major widespread improvements when I A) got in visibly good shape and B) became confident in my professional career and abilities. I behaved differently as a result of my confidence, and it is clear as day to me, including the more positive results it delivers.

My angsty nervous young adult self, completely unconfident, was working against me. I don’t think I “deserved” that in any retributive sense, but yeah, I can see how people respond differently to confident people vs perpetually negative doubters. It’s no one’s fault, it’s not cruelty, it’s just how social humans work in large part (not all cases, of course, but most)

I would point out that there's a middle way between those stances: GLP-1 receptor agonism has anti-auto-immune effects.

(I don't know yet if anyone has determined whether this is a direct effect of GLP-1R agonism; or whether e.g. metabolic disorder has auto-immune aspects, and GLP-1R agonism effectively treats metabolic disorder; or whether it's just that e.g. sugar and other simple carbs are directly pro-auto-immune, and GLP-1R agonism breaks the addictive salience of sugars/simple carbs in such a way that even if you're eating the same amount, you're putting less of those in your body. Regardless of the mechanism, there does seem to be a consensus on the overall anti-auto-immune effect itself.)

The anti-auto-immune effects of GLP-1RAs show up visibly, e.g. on the face, entirely separately from the effects of weight loss (because this effect still occurs even when the dose of GLP-1RAs is too low to provoke weight loss), in the form of decreased puffiness, oiliness, acne, chapped lips, etc. It causes a bunch of small changes that make someone look like they're "taking better care of themselves" (even though they may have been taking assiduous care of themselves before, but didn't look it, for autoimmune reasons.) People definitely judge others on how "healthy" they look, so this could definitely help someone to get a job.

But the anti-auto-immune effects of GLP-1RAs also show up in entirely unconscious behavioral changes — not in anything cognitive, like "confidence", but rather due to GLP-1RAs being at least partly effective in treating chronic, sometimes-subclinical, usually-not-well-managed autoimmune pain disorders (think fibromyalgia) and autoimmune energy disorders (think ME-CFS.) Being less achey and having more energy makes people behave differently — whether that be on the macro level in subconscious decision-making (think of how people make different choices when overtired without being aware of it — people with chronic energy disorders are "overtired" 100% of the time!), or on the micro level, in terms of how e.g. speech is performed (people have reported becoming less "croaky", and their usable vocal range expanding), how nonverbal communication is performed (it's easier and "cheaper" to move your face and head and body, so you do), etc.

And note how, for these behavioral changes, some of these might be obvious to the person going through the changes (like your voice changing); but others are things you may not be aware has changed.

For facial expressions in particular, people learn to use their face in certain expressive ways when they're young, and then often don't notice when their face stops "responding" fully/correctly/in the way they'd anticipate to their brain's commands to execute these expressions. As far as you're concerned, you're doing what you always did; it's just that, at some point, you developed an autoimmune condition that attacked (or plugged up with waste) some nerves or muscles or tissues or whatever, that made those higher-level signals from your motor cortex stop translating perfectly to actually initiating the actions you expected. Most people don't periodically test their facial expressions in a mirror, so you only get info about the breakdown of these capabilities reflected in other people's reactions toward you changing. And, likewise, if these capabilities were to be suddenly restored, you'd only find out through others' reactions to you as well!

Why is lookism supposed to be bad/stigma, but favoring intelligent people is good/meritocracy? Both are "unjust" in the sense that they are a result of genetic lottery. If anything, it's the intelligence you are born with that you can't do anything about.

Society is better off with more intelligence, but also with more beauty! As we automate intelligence, the selection pressure on good looks will only increase.

why not both?

Attractive people regardless of sex are universally treated better, unattractive - worse.

You could call it a stigma or prejudice, but until calliagnosia[0] becomes a reality, it is what it is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liking_What_You_See:_A_Documen...