The effect of perceived responsibility on stigma toward people experiencing food insecurity and accessing food...

University students are disproportionately at risk of food insecurity, and subsequent poor physical and mental health and low academic performance. However, students may not access food support due to associated stigma. Stigma toward people experiencing food insecurity is thought to partly originate from negative media stories which highlight the driving role of internal responsibility, despite research suggesting that external factors are more culpable. Grounded in attribution theory, this pre-registered (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/9X7M2) online experiment aimed to examine the effect of perceived responsibility for food insecurity and food support access on stigmatizing attitudes, namely cognitive beliefs, affective reactions and discriminatory inclinations.

Participants (N = 322, N = 106 self-reporting as food insecure, all university students over 18 years old), were randomly assigned to one of three conditions requiring them to read a bogus newspaper article framing food insecurity and food support access as originating from (i) perceived internal responsibility; (ii) perceived external responsibility; or a (iii) control article with no responsibility framing. Then participants read a standard vignette regarding a fictional character who was experiencing food insecurity and accessing a food bank, before completing measures of stigma toward the fictional vignette character.

There were no statistically significant effects of condition on stigma toward the fictional character.

However, methodological issues could have contributed to these null findings, including an insufficient experimental manipulation and use of self-reported measures to quantify stigmatizing attitudes which are vulnerable to social desirability. Future research might explore the research aims using repeated exposures to media stories and behavioral over self-report measures of stigma.