Fat Sociable People and Lean Worrying People

04/05/08 revised

Prof. Otake of Osaka University introduces an interesting topic:

Prof. Tsuji of Tohoku University says that sociable people and selfish people are more likely to be fat while worrywarts lean.

In Prof. Otake's conjecture, worrying could be closely related to human's behavior of risk aversion (the behavior that people are less willing to take risk). When we describe such human behavior, we usually assume that we have a concave utility function in economic theory.

Risk aversion determines people's way to consume and to work. However, we haven't known a lot yet about how it affects human behavior and economy.

As an interesting topic in this area, we can raise the issue of "hyperbolic discounting", which means a way of accounting in a model for the difference in the preferences an consumer has over consumption now versus consumption in the future.

It just looks like that today's Taro plays a kind of game with tomorrow's Taro.

Anyway, if the behavior of risk aversion tended to make people lean, the related researches would be great and possibly we could get something important to conduct any health public policy.

社交的な人や自己中心的な人ほど肥満が多く、心配性の程度が強いほどやせの人が増える傾向にあることが、約３万人を対象にした辻一郎・東北大教授（公衆衛生学）らの調査で分かった。性格と肥満の関係は、十分な根拠がないまま議論されることが多く、１万人以上を対象に調べた研究は世界的にも例がないという。
毎日新聞　2008年1月19日　東京夕刊