Attributional Analysis To College Students' Responsibility Judgment Related With Some Typical Social Stigmas

With the development of our society, there were a lot of social stigmas which came into being. These problems have influenced our physical and mental healthy, and threatened the stability of our society and economic development. These topics have elicited a lot of attentions and researches from philosophers, ethicists, socialists and psychologists.This dissertation found out the typical social stigmas (e.g. AIDS, Drug abuse, Alcoholism, Obesity, family abuse, Smoking, Depression etc.) by open-end questionnaire based on attributional theory and the related researches. 309 participants attended these studies, and the differences of their reactions related with attribution, responsibility, affect, and help giving or punishment were tested. The relationships among these variables were settled.Results showed:1. These twelve stigmas were evaluated by participants to be more internal and controllable, and the targets tended to have responsibility. For example, spousal abuse was regarded as high controllable, high responsibility, high angry and low sympathy and help-giving; but unemployment was regarded as having lower responsibility, low anger, and high help-giving.2. In study two, participants tended to think internal and controllable causes (e.g. got AIDS through frequent causal sex with many women) related with high responsibility, low sympathy and high anger, high punishment and low pro-social behavior; external and uncontrollable causes (e.g. got AIDS through a blood transfusion) related with low responsibility, high sympathy and low anger, low punishment and high pro-social behavior.3. Three were main effects of gender on responsibility, anger and help giving by , female students more likely make higher responsibility judgment, and showedmore angry and more likely to give help to the target than male students. Three were main effects of major on attribution, responsibility judgment and sympathy, the students from science majors tended to think the reason was more controllable and the target having higher responsibility, and showed more sympathy to the stigmatized target than students from social science majors. In addition, female students had more knowledge related with AIDS than males.4. Two SEM built by EQS made some cross-culture proves for Weiner's attributional theory of responsibility judgment. The quantities relationships among these variables were more clearly known through these studies. In general, these links could be summarized as:Attributional locus and controllability → responsibility → affect responses (anger and sympathy) → punishment or pro-social behavior.