Celebrities, particularly female celebrities, are customarily criticized about their appearance in magazines and newspapers. While we generally don’t give much importance to those nasty headlines assuming they are trivial, little do we realize that the effects of such comments can extend well beyond the targeted person and ripple through the population at large.

A recent research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, has shown that fat shaming celebrities may negatively impact all women’s body image or their attitude about their body.

Psychologists from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada used data collected from more than 93,000 women, predominantly from North America, between 2004 to 2015 and compared 20 instances of celebrity fat shaming with women’s implicit attitudes about weight two weeks before and two weeks after each celebrity fat-shaming event. The investigators found that there was an association…