Striking the golden section in stigma research

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Jonathan D. Raskin on how the way we organise information could be the key to reducing the negative labelling of others.

Nobody likes to see others unfairly stigmatised, but it happens more often than we wish to admit. Calling someone homeless, mentally ill, disabled or elderly – even when descriptively on the mark – can have serious consequences for those so labelled. Of course, sometimes people benefit by stigmatising others. In the2008 US presidential election, JohnMcCain worked hard to label Barack Obama as inexperienced, while Obama in turn tried to cast McCain as out of touch. Politicians know that half the electoral battle is successfully pinning a negative tag on one’s opponent.
But does stigma primarily stem from slapping harmful monikers on others? Surely how people behave plays a major role in whether or not they become stigmatised. That is, it is also important to consider how much a stigmatising label seems to fit the bill. Stigma researchers have studied –and argued about – these questions for over 40 years. Yet recent research on an obscure and rather strange hypothesis known as the golden section adds a new twist to the discussion. The golden section hypothesis suggests that stigma occurs when the typical way people evaluate others – using a ratio of 62 percent positive ratings to 38 per cent negative – gets inverted. Such a hypothesis has interesting implications for thinking about stigma and how to effectively combat it.

A brief history of stigma research

It is probably reasonable to consider the1960s and early 1970s the heyday of stigma research. The anti-psychiatry movement peaked during the 1960s when psychiatry was under assault from all directions. From the right came Thomas Szasz, whose libertarian-inspired politics led him to argue that mental illness was a nonsensical concept because minds could not be physically sick. For Szasz (1963,1974), labelling people as mentally ill justified the nefarious purpose of silencing the socially disagreeable. From the left came the likes of R.D. Laing(1965), who – with chaotic results, by most accounts – tried to encourage more egalitarian mental institutions where the distinction between patient and doctor was blurred and the stigma of mental illness diminished. Both Szasz and Laing challenged the medical model. For them, diagnosing people as mentally ill was harmful, stigmatising and inappropriate.
Around the same time, other prominent thinkers were echoing similar ideas. Erving Goffman (1961) wrote about mental hospitals as ‘total institutions’. His contention was that such places help produce and sustain the very behaviours they are supposed to remedy. Somewhat later, David Rosenhan (1973) conducted his famous study on being sane in insane places, in which he and a group of his students presented themselves for admission at local hospitals in order to see whether the staff could distinguish ‘sane’ from ‘insane’. All of them were admitted for observation and assigned a psychiatric diagnosis. Even when released, none of these pseudo patients was correctly identified as an impostor. Instead, they were labelled as ‘in remission’. It was a testament to the potentially long-lasting nature of arbitrarily assigned labels and it confirmed a lot of the scepticism popular at the time about psychiatric diagnosis. (As a historical side note, one of Rosenhan’s pseudo patients was his student Martin Seligman. Seligman went on to develop positive psychology, an approach that downplays labelling people as disordered and instead focuses on the positive aspects of psychological functioning.)

In light of the era’s scepticism about mental disorder labels, it is not surprising that sociologist Thomas Scheff (1999)proposed his famous labelling theory, which in its original form held that the assignment of labels actually produces, rather than describes, deviant behaviour. Scheff’s theory proposed a very provocative and testable hypothesis, one which generated a great deal of research.
However, the strong form of Scheff’s hypothesis did not hold up to empirical scrutiny. Researchers repeatedly found that labels are not assigned completely arbitrarily. That is, how one behaves matters a great deal. The research discredited the notion that deviant behaviour springs almost exclusively from being labelled. Deviant behaviour, not pernicious labelling, re-emerged as the primary rationale for labelling people.