Acceso usuarios
Alice Lee Yoon, Sherry J. Wu, Jason Chin, Heather M. Caruso, Eugene M. Caruso
For the past decade, the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars annually on public welfare programs, yet over 30% of eligible individuals do not access benefits distributed through these programs. We propose that a key barrier to program participation is miscalibrated perception of public stigma—individuals’ pessimistic impressions of the stigma with which the general public regards welfare-eligible people. First, we examine how people’s own attitudes toward a welfare-eligible individual compare to their estimates of parallel attitudes among their peers and among the general public. Study 1 specifically categorizes spontaneous reactions to learning someone is eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits: stigma, negativity about help-seeking, pity, envy, willingness to help, happiness, and admiration. Using these seven dimensions, Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate widespread pluralistic ignorance of welfare stigma: Participants believed that they held more positive, and less negative, attitudes toward SNAP-eligible individuals than did their peers or the American public. Studies 3A and 3B utilize established, incentive-compatible designs from the pluralistic ignorance literature to reveal that participants held less negative personal views about the SNAP-eligible population than they believed others did. Study 4 demonstrates the causal potential of perceived public stigma to reduce individuals’ intentions to apply for SNAP and to refer the program to peers. Study 5 tests an intervention with a SNAP-eligible population to demonstrate that perceived public stigma can indeed be decreased, although the observed decreases were not sufficient to increase near-term SNAP application or referral tendencies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
