Testing the mixed-blessings model: What is the role of essentialism for stigmatizing attitudes towards schizophrenia?

Abstract

It is well established that emphasizing a biogenetic etiology of mental health problems in anti-stigma interventions inadvertently increases potentially stigmatizing attitudes. The “mixed-blessings” model suggests that biogenetic explanations and greater stigma are linked by essentialism. The present study tests this hypothesis experimentally. In this online experiment, 367 subjects read either a biogenetic or a psychosocial explanation for the etiology of schizophrenia, followed by a vignette describing an individual who has schizophrenia. Subsequently, we measured (a) causal beliefs on the etiology of schizophrenia (as a manipulation check), (b) the degree of essentialist beliefs (mediator), (c) the extent to which subjects subscribed to assumptions of dangerousness, (d) prognostic pessimism, and (e) desire for social distance. Subjects reported a stronger agreement with the etiology they had been presented. Against our expectations, this did not result in higher levels of stigmatizing attitudes in the biogenetic vignette group. Correspondingly, mediation through essentialism could not be tested. In the psychosocial vignette group, biogenetic causal beliefs were associated with a stronger desire for social distance. Essentialist thinking fully mediated this effect. The evidence we found for the assumptions of the mixed-blessings extended to the psychosocial vignette group only. We explain this by the subjects’ different readiness to subscribe to biogenetic and psychosocial causal beliefs. We argue that the same levels of essentialism between the experimental groups contributed to the equal levels of stigmatizing attitudes. This underlines the fundamental importance of essentialism in stigma, going beyond a role in the psychological effects of biogenetic causal models.