Striking the golden section in stigma research

---

Another way to think about the golden section is in terms of background and foreground, with positive attributes constituting the foreground against which negative attributes stand out. The positive constitutes the original whole against which the negative is distinguished. This possibly explains why people pay more attention to negative news than positive news. Positive goings-on blend into the background, while negative occurrences stand out against the otherwise humdrum positive backdrop. This is why television news channels get better ratings when things don’t go as planned. The usual and expected simply isn’t as newsworthy.
Though nobody is sure why, the golden section hypothesis has proved itself to be incredibly robust. Research repeatedly finds that when people rate others using adjective pairs with clear positive and negative ends, they do so according to the golden section ratio. The golden section hypothesis holds when people rate acquaintances, activities, unfamiliar faces, imaginary people with nonsense syllables for names, and even cartoon characters (Adams-Webber, 1977; Benjafield & Pomeroy, 1978; Lee & Adams-Webber, 1987; Lee, 2006). Why the golden section ratio is so robust remains unresolved, but it seems reasonable to speculate that it provides a default way to organise information when lacking prior experience.
Psychologists coming from a constructivist perspective have speculated that golden section research lends support to the central tenet of constructivist psychology, namely that how we organise experience is as important as, or more important than, events themselves.
Some have even suggested that the human mind contains an ‘algebraic processor’ for ordering and arranging information (Lefebvre et al., 1986). If so, then golden section research potentially provides indirect empirical evidence of this processor at work.
A few studies have examined whether the golden section holds for people diagnosed with mental disorders. For example, one study found that people with thought-disordered and non-thought disordered schizophrenia diagnoses evaluated both acquaintances and objects using the golden section ratio (Kahgee et al., 1982). Another study showed, with some minor variations across diagnostic categories, that psychiatric outpatients used the golden section ratio when rating themselves (Badesha & Horley, 2000).
However, several students and I carried out a recent study that took things in a new direction, one relevant for labelling research. We examined whether or not a ‘reverse’ golden section ratio serves as a default way to organise positive and negative information when evaluating stigmatised people (Raskin et al., 2008).
The basic idea behind the study was simple. Typically, the golden section consists of negative information in the foreground against a background of positive assumptions. But what if foreground and background get reversed? What if negative information is the baseline against which positive information stands out? Isn’t it possible that people become stigmatised when the ratio of positive to negative information is inverted? It doesn’t matter whether this ratio gets reversed based on how someone behaves or how someone is labelled. Either way, it was hypothesised that once positive attributes stand out against a solid backdrop of negative assumptions, stigma is the result. So our basic research question was this: Is it possible that stigmatised people are rated according to the golden section hypothesis, but in reverse?
We asked undergraduates to rate nine different identities using 12 adjective pairs, each with a clearly distinguished positive and negative pole. What we found confirmed our expectations. When rating ‘stigmatised others’ – in this case people labelled ‘mental patient’ and ‘homeless person’ – participants did so using a reverse golden section pattern. That is, students assigned positive adjectives to stigmatised people roughly 38 per cent of the time and negative adjectives roughly 62 per cent of the time. This was the first empirical evidence for a reverse golden section.
What are the implications of this finding for stigma research? It suggests that people attribute both positive and negative attributes to stigmatised individuals, but in a manner where negative qualities are assumed and positive ones stand out as striking and unique. This implies that attributing a positive characteristic to a person labelled as mentally ill or homeless may not suffice as evidence of a non-stigmatised perception. To the contrary, the very reason a positive quality may warrant comment is because it comes as a surprise.
In observing that ‘Jimmy is very neat’, one may simply be noticing something that stands out. After all, if Jimmy is diagnosed with a psychotic disorder and assumed to be low-functioning in most domains, his clean room may indeed seem striking.