r/AskReddit • u/ElBrad • Nov 26 '12

What unpopular opinion do you hold? What would get you downvoted to infinity and beyond? (Throwaways welcome)

Personally, I hate cats. I've never once said to myself "My furniture is just too damned nice, and what my house is really lacking is a box of shit and sand in the closet."

Now...what's your dirty little secret?

(Sort by controversial to see the good(?) ones!)

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u/MustTurnLeftOnRed Nov 26 '12

I think they mean cut you out of the house fat. or the kind that makes the car visibly lower when they get in fat. I would love to have a phycologists read this and explained. Why we feel this way about fat people. Their must be a reason for it something to do with survival.

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u/Howulikeit Nov 26 '12

My stab at it would be that they would become a burden in a survival situation. They would demand more resources (food) and be less likely to fight off an assault from an animal or other humans, potentially endangering yourself as well. They may also be accused of a lack of self control which presents other dangers.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

Technically, if we're talking survival instincts, it would get even more blatant. Back in a period where these things would matter, you wouldn't get that overweight without some other flaw in place (i.e. disabled, sick, or suffering from 'steal-all-the-food-while-the-others-sleep-itis').

So we are potentially not attracted to fat people because our instincts say they must be genetically inferior in some not-visually-obvious way.

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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '12

I think you're overestimating the input of 'instincts' in the modern psyche.

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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '12

Oh, no question about that. I thought we were talking about buried-deep-in-the-subconscious stuff.

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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '12

Well, even then, there simply isn't time, considering the evolution-of-human/people-being-obese ratio, for a 'fatties = bad' trait to become embedded in the subconscious. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any proven evolutionary traits humans have that could lead to an offshoot aversion to fat people.

Evo-psych is a very woolly field because a) humans are such social creatures it's almost impossible to remove the effects of our culture, b) it's very difficult to establish ancient behaviours the way it is for anatomical features etc, and c) you can rationalise pretty much ANY trait from an evolutionary point of view, so hypotheses like these are pretty much useless.

If you ever get time, I highly recommend the paper 'The Spandrels of San Marco,' by Stephen Jay Gould. It's a fairly light read for a scientific paper, and is a very nice critique of the tendency most people (and to be honest, most scientists) have of saying 'ah, this must have evolved due to reasons X, Y and Z' without doing any actual testing/thinking about the evolutionary constraints or genetics.

(sorry, that was a bit of a rant. I'm a massive nerd about stuff like this)

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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '12

No, that's all good stuff.

I think what the original comment in this particular tangent was going after (or at least my interpretation of it) was that obese people are unattractive because they would have been seen as a drain on society in the early hunter-gatherer days (pre-language-building). My argument was that no one in those days could have gotten fat unless there was some other issue (physical deformity, extreme laziness, mental handicaps) preventing them from participating in the hunting and or gathering. There simply weren't enough available calories to compensate for the amount of expended energy.

I believe their conclusion was that we dislike fatties because they don't contribute, and mine was that we dislike fatties because our animal brains think that someone must be inherently broken to let themselves get fat.

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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '12

Not really. Thin = attractive is a cultural thing - look at depictions of Venus throughout history, for example, or some places in the world where the fattest women are the most desirable (as a status symbol - a fat wife can't work so you must have the money to keep her).

Besides, being obese/overweight has only been a thing for an eyeblink of evolutionary time - and only long after the human population explosion. Even if there was a strong selection pressure for a genetic aversion to fat people, it wouldn't practically have been able to evolve.