In high-profile violent incidents, there appears to be a disproportionate focus on the perpetrator's mental health status in relation to the incident. Research has consistently noted that news reports on mental illness are biased toward describing violent incidents, and there is evidence that the media is a significant source contributing to the public's knowledge about mental illness.
In their paper published in Stigma and Healthopens in new window, Ginny Chan and Philip Yanos wanted to further delineate the mechanisms underlying one's reading, and subsequent memory, of a news article about a violent incident. The authors hypothesized that the mention of mental illness in articles describing violent incidents would lead people to infer a causal link between the two.
In an online study (n=172), participants were randomly assigned to identical descriptions of an assault with the only difference being that "Mr. John Doe has a history of schizophrenia" was added in the experimental condition. The accuracy of the information remembered from the article was then tested.
Immediately after reading the article, roughly 40% of people assigned to the experimental condition (in contrast with only 2% of those in the control condition) stated that schizophrenia was the cause of the incident. After a week's delay, participants were contacted again and by then, 64% of those exposed to mention of schizophrenia (and 5% of those not) indicated that schizophrenia was causally related to the crime.
Alarmingly, significantly more people who read that the suspect had schizophrenia endorsed (false) memories that the article had indicated that the cause of the attack was the mental illness, that the suspect was unpredictable, had to be psychiatrically examined, and/or had to be subdued by many policemen — these were never mentioned in the original article but consistent with mental illness stereotypes.
One theory highlighted by the authors to explain the results was "pragmatic inference," which posits that one does not remember information verbatim and may remember details that were not explicitly stated but plausibly implied.
From a social cognitive perspective, pragmatic inference and stereotype priming provide a framework to understand the reader's comprehension as it captures the reality of information processing in real-time. That is, the lay person tends to only remember the gist of information, rather than accurate details, and that the remembered material can also be impacted by stereotypes that are activated by a priming stimulus (mention of mental illness).
The authors also wanted to know if thinking styles and preexisting attitudes and beliefs impacted on the accuracy of the memory.
Results did not find any evidence for the impact. Rather, it suggests that the mere inclusion of a sentence about mental illness could lead to a cascade of inferences tinged by negative stereotypes. Thus, responsible and more prudent reporting is recommended in terms of the inclusion of only pertinent information in news articles on violent incidents.
Citation
- Chan, G., & Yanos, P. T. (2018). Media depictions and the priming of mental illness stigma. Stigma and Health, 3(3), 253–264. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/sah0000095
Note: This article is in the Health Psychology & Medicine topic area. View more articles in the Health Psychology & Medicine topic area.