April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: Are We Promoting Stigma? An Investigation of Detrimental Effects of Stigma Scales
One potential risk of investigating stigma through self-reports is unintentional reinforcement of stigma (Millum et al., 2019). Commonly used self-report scales to assess stigma usually include items that directly confront people with the negative stereotypes underlying the respective stigma (Pescosolido & Martin, 2015). Research on priming (Carpentier, 2020) and stereotype activation/ application (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000) suggests that exposure to stigma scales might potentially activate and reinforce existing stigma-relevant beliefs. Yet, research to date has surprisingly neglected this issue of potential detrimental effects. This study tests the assumption that exposure to stigma scales including negative stereotypes promotes implicit stigma. Method A preregistered 2×2 between-subject online experiment was conducted with a final sample of 648 participants (52.7 % female; Mage = 49.2, SDage = 16.3), who were randomly assigned to one of four experimental groups considering stigma scale exposure (yes/no) and topic (pre-exposure prophylaxis [PrEP] user/ weight loss surgery [WLS] patients) as experimental factors. For the experimental manipulation of scale exposure, comparable 9-item scales were created for PrEP users (Klein & Washington, 2019) and WLS patients (Hansen & Dye, 2018). Implicit stigma was measured using a reaction time (RT) task asking participants to rate whether a certain adjective applies to the presented exemplar or not as quickly as possible. Adjectives came from the stigma scale items and the warmth and competence dimensions of the stereotype content model (Fiske et al., 2002). RTs were preprocessed according to established conventions (Wittenbrink et al., 2001). Results and Discussion ANCOVAs with either stigma, warmth, or competence RTs as dependent variables were used to analyze the data; age, gender, and RTs to irrelevant adjectives served as covariates. Results indicate a significant main effect of exposure to a scale containing stigmatizing statements on implicit stigma, F(1, 625) = 14.00, p < .001, η² = .011, with RTs being faster for participants exposed to the scale. More importantly, a three-way interaction between topic, scale exposure, and adjective agreement, F(1, 621) = 3.89, p = .049, η² = .003, shows that in the WLS group the effect of heightened accessibility was stronger, when participants agreed with the stigma adjectives, b = .28, SE = .07, p < .001, compared to when not, b = .08, SE = .03, p = .013. Although the effects did not generalize to the dimensions of the stereotype content model, our findings show that even a short exposure to stigma scales heightens accessibility and potentially strengthens stigma beliefs. Even though this study is a first exploratory attempt at identifying potential adverse effects of utilizing such scales, it does underline the relevance of future investigations.