Beyond the Dichotomy: Modernizing StigmaCategorization

摘要

Even though our knowledge of the cause of disease and disability has grown, stigma still exists. Weiner, Perry, and Magnusson’s seminal study on attributions of stigma has been cited over 500 times since its publication in 1988. The current research sought to replicate and expand this literature in two studies. We used the 10 stigmas from the original study and we added six more (representing common psychological and physical stigmas). In the first study, we examined the classification of stigmas using cluster analysis. We found that instead of dichotomizing stigmas into either psychological or physical, attributions of controllability and stability together resulted in four distinct clusters. Although these were mostly consistent with past literature, the fourth cluster included both psychological and physical stigmas and was rated as moderately controllable and moderately stable. In the second study, we examined how information about responsibility shifts causal attributions, emotional responses, and helping behaviors. Information that an individual was responsible for their stigma led to greater attributions of controllability, less positive emotions, and less help compared to information that an individual was not responsible. More interestingly, the no-information control condition wassimilar to the responsibility information condition for stigmas that fell intothe controllable clusters whereas the control condition was similar to the notresponsible information condition for stigmas that fell into the uncontrollableclusters. While parsimony is valued, the psychological/physical dichotomy is notnuanced enough to fully capture the variation in stigmas, which in turn hasimplications for future research on stigma reduction.