Rejection of the Mentally Ill: an Experiment in Labeling

Several studies of public rejection of the mentally ill using written vignettes have demonstrated limited support for the societal reaction perspective. Since written vignettes may be inadequate, this investigation used video-taped sequences of individual behavior during a counseling session. The study was a 2 × 2 × 3 factorial experiment with behavior, label, and actor's account as the independent variables. College students served as subjects. Both behavior and label (paranoid, normal) had significant main effects on the social rejection variable, whereas only label had a significant effect on the second dependent variable–perceived social competence. These findings are in contrast to the earlier studies and indicate that labels are likely to more powerfully affect public reaction to mental illness when behavior is directly perceived in a situational context.