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 was similar to the responsibility information condition for stigmas that fell into the controllable clusters whereas the control condition was similar to the not responsible information condition for stigmas that fell into the uncontrollable clusters. While parsimony is valued, the psychological/physical dichotomy is not nuanced enough to fully capture the variation in stigmas, which in turn has implications for future research on stigma reduction.

The current study tested the utility of 2 models in understanding the stigma of being a birth mother of a child with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). The attribution model (AM) sought to explain helping behaviors from controllability and positive emotions, whereas the stereotype content model (SCM) and corresponding behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes (BIAS) map sought to explain active and passive facilitation from stereotypes of warmth and competence and emotions of admiration, pity, envy, and contempt. A total of 267 ethnically diverse undergraduates (M age ϭ 19.18, 75% female) were recruited to complete an online questionnaire. Participants rated birth mothers of a child with FASD on measures of (a) controllability, positive emotions, and helping behaviors for the AM and (b) stereotypes, elicited affectϪemotions, and behavioral tendencies for the SCMϪBIAS map. Mediation analyses were done using the PROCESS macro for SPSS, applying 5,000 bootstrap resamples with 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals estimated around the indirect effect. As expected, for the AM, mothers rated as higher in controllability elicited fewer positive emotions, and this in turn elicited less help. Also as expected, for the SCMϪBIAS map, mothers rated as more warm and competent elicited more admiration, and this admiration in turn elicited more facilitation behaviors. Helping in the AM was strongly related to active and passive facilitation in the SCMϪBIAS map, although the SCMϪBIAS map explained more of the variance in facilitation than the AM explained in helping. Implications are discussed in terms of future research and stigma reduction interventions.

The current research examined attributional evaluations and health perceptions of targets with various disabilities and explored the role that government assistance and coping played in shaping these ratings across three studies. Participants were recruited from Amazon’s MTurk (n = 163, 200, and 180, respectively). Participants read vignettes describing three women with disabilities (cardiovascular disease, depression, and pain; Study 1). In Study 2, this information was standardized to explore disability differences attributed to the disability, and in Study 3, specific information about coping was also presented. Across all three studies, government assistance was not predictive of attributional evaluations or health perceptions. However, in two of the three studies, disabilities did differ in attributional evaluations and health perceptions. Specifically, cardiovascular disease was rated the harshest. Coping also led to differences in attributional evaluations and health perceptions with targets who did not cope at all receiving the harshest ratings, while targets who actively coped receiving the kindest ratings, and this was independent of disability. Results suggest that information about stigma onset and offset are both important in the attributional process whether implicit in the disability or explicitly stated in the vignette as coping. These results may inform stigma reduction efforts and future research.