This research investigates the impact of cues about ascriptive group characteristics (race, class, gender) and the causes of ill health (health behaviors, inborn biological traits, social systemic factors) on beliefs about who deserves society's help in paying for the costs of medical treatment. Drawing on data from three original vignette experiments embedded in a nationally representative sur...

Causal attributions control, beliefs, and helpful and unhelpful support attempts were examined among people experiencing chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and their close others. Results revealed that 84% of respondents with CFS believed that their illness was due, at least in part, to physical or external causes, whereas 47% mentioned internal/psychological causes. Reports of internal causal attr...

BACKGROUND Patients' illness beliefs have been associated with glycaemic control in diabetes and survival in other conditions. OBJECTIVE We examined whether illness beliefs independently predicted survival in patients with diabetes and foot ulceration. METHODS Patients (n=169) were recruited between 2002 and 2007. Data on illness beliefs were collected at baseline. Data on survival were ext...

Cognitive psychological research focuses on causal learning and reasoning while cognitive anthropological and social science research tend to focus on systems of beliefs. Our aim was to explore how these two types of research can inform each other. Cognitive psychological theories (causal model theory and causal Bayes nets) were used to derive predictions for systems of causal beliefs. These pr...

Causal models of illness vary extensively across socio-cultural groups. The current paper describes two studies that were designed to explore the role of universal domain-specific causal knowledge in causal models of illness. The first study compares illness causal models in three American groups: registered nurses, energy healers, and college undergraduates. The second study examines illness c...

In 3 studies, we examined the hypothesis that the effects of stereotype usage on target judgments are moderated by causal uncertainty beliefs and related accuracy goal structures. In Study 1, we focused on the role of chronically accessible causal uncertainty beliefs as predictors of a target's level of guilt for an alleged academic misconduct offense. In Study 2, we examined the role of chroni...

Traditional approaches to human causal reasoning assume that the perception of temporal order informs judgments of causal structure. In this article, we present two experiments in which people followed the opposite inferential route: Perceptual judgments of temporal order were instead influenced by causal beliefs. By letting participants freely interact with a software-based "physics world," we...

OBJECTIVES To establish the prevalence and correlates of continuum beliefs for five mental illnesses in a multiethnic population and to explore its association with stigma. DESIGN A community-based, cross-sectional study. SETTING A national study in a multiethnic Asian country. PARTICIPANTS A comprehensive study of 3006 Singapore residents (Singapore citizens and permanent residents) aged...

The Virginia Tech and Columbine High shootings are 2 of the deadliest school massacres in the United States. The present study investigates in a nationally representative sample how White Americans' causal attributions of these shooting moderate their attitudes toward the shooter's race. White Americans shown a vignette based on the Virginia Tech shooting were more likely to espouse negative be...