Revisiting Stigma Attributions and Reactions to Stigma: Replication Registered Report of Weiner et al. (1988) With Extensions Examining New Stigmas and Stigma Origin Categorization

Weiner et al. (1988) found that compared to physically based stigmas, mental-behavioral stigmas were perceived as more onset controllable, less stable (irreversible) and were therefore associated with less pity and liking, more anger, and less willingness to help. We conducted a replication and extension Registered Report of Experiment 2 by Weiner et al. (1988) with a US American online Amazon Mechanical Turk sample through CloudResearch (N = 804). We found support for the original findings on the associations between stigma origin (i.e., mental-behavioral or physically based), perceived stability, perceived onset controllability, emotional reactions (i.e., sympathy, liking, and anger), and willingness to help (all η2ps ≥ .35). We also found support for higher perceived controllability leading to increased ratings on perceived responsibility, blame, and anger, and decreasing liking, sympathy, and tendencies to provide donations and assistance for stigmatized individuals (all η2ps ≥ .03). Extending the replication, we tested the model with four new stigmas prevalent in the last decade. We also assessed the original study’s untested categorizations of stigmas sources - physical versus mental-behavioral and found that 7 out of 10 categorizations matched with the original’s. We concluded that we found support for the relationship between stigma source and the attribution-affect-help judgment model. Materials, data, and code are available on the OSF: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/GWCBT. This Registered Report has been officially endorsed by Peer Community in Registered Reports: https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.rr.100885