Responsibility judgments and responses to people living with AIDS in China: testing an attributional perspective

Abstract

With one in five individuals in the world living in China, there is an urgent need for HIV prevention and understanding HIV/AIDS stigma in China. This study applies an attributional analysis to Chinese students' responses to AIDS, examining effects of attributions of causal controllability for HIV infection on reactions to people living with HIV/AIDS. Students (n = 309) read one of two scenarios describing an AIDS patient and manipulating controllability of AIDS onset. Controllability of AIDS onset contributed to responsibility judgments, less positive affect, and lower desires to personally interact with the patient. Responsibility judgments predicted interaction wishes directly and indirectly through positive affect. Results provide support for Weiner's interpersonal attributional model. Implications for responses to AIDS in China are discussed.

Is Weiner's attribution-help model stable across cultures? A test in Brazilian subcultures

“…In the uncontrollability condition, the helping intention is significantly higher than in the controllability condition. The analysis of effect size also indicates a small to moderate magnitude consistent with effects seen in other studies (Zhang et al, ). In general, manipulating attribution causes a stable effect on helping for all the regions, unaffected by cultural variation.…”

“…Evidence shows that the degree of the victim's control over the situation affects the emotional reaction and the likelihood of helping intentions. The theoretical model has received empirical support from later studies, using different data analysis techniques (Betancourt, ; Mullen & Skitka, ; Pilati, ; Pilati, Leão, Vieira, & Fonseca, ; Rudolph, Roesch, Greitemeyer, & Weiner, ; Schmidt & Weiner, ; Zhang et al, ). These studies tested the mediational effect of compassion and sympathy on the relationship between attribution of responsibility and intention to help.…”

“…His arguments are based on papers that tested the model in the Japanese culture, a prototypical collectivist culture, very different from the U.S. where Weiner's theoretical development was formed. More recent research in China, a collectivist country, has replicated the assumption that contagion uncontrollability led participants to be more sympathetic with a person with AIDS (Zhang, Rivkin, & An, ), but another study demonstrated that the role of emotion in Weiner's model is affected by culture (Mullen & Skitka, ). To the best of our knowledge there is no previous research aiming to test this model, moreover with the mediational role of emotion, in a country with multiple established subcultures.…”

Empathy is a stable predictor of compassionate emotions independent of an attribution of responsibility manipulation

“…There is plenty of evidence corroborating this model (Pilati, Leão, Vieira, & Fonseca, 2008;Pilati, 2011;Rudolph, Roesch, Greitemeyer, & Weiner, 2004;Weiner, 1980aWeiner, , 1980bZhang, Rivkin, & An, 2013), but there has been little investigation into how individual differences such as empathy and personal distress affect the postulated processes. How is empathy related to attribution of responsibility?…”

“…We chose this method because it has proved robust and elicited moderate to large effects in several different cultures (Zhang et al, 2013) and it is therefore presented as a suitable context to evaluate associations between compassionate emotions and putative antecedent variables, and more particularly, whether any such associations were independent of the attribution of responsibility. Manipulations whose purported effects are difficult to replicate are an increasing problem in experimental psychology (Asendorpf et al, 2013).…”