Stigmas are profoundly negative stereotypes of a social group and its members that have diffused and normalized throughout a community. Being marked as a member of a stigmatized group does more than designate someone as different: stigmas denote people as discredited, devalued, and disgraced. Stigmas shape health and risk communication and are considered the leading—but least understood—barrier to health promotion.
Communication and stigmas are dynamically connected. Communication is critical to a stigma’s existence, spread, expression, coping, and elimination. Using mediated and interpersonal communication, community members are socialized to recognize and react to stigmatized people. People use communication to enact the devaluation and ostracism of stigmatized people, and stigmatized people use communication to cope with stigmatization. Stigmas also shape communication: stigmas compel non-marked persons to engage in stigmatization and ostracism of marked persons, reduce marked people’s disclosure and encourage secrecy, and shape the characteristics of personal and community networks. Last, campaigns have used communication to attempt to eliminate existing stigmas. The accumulating research, conducted from diverse assumptions about human behavior (cultural determinism, evolutionary, socio-functional), shows how easily and effectively stigmas may be socialized; how challenging they are to manage; how many facets of health and wellbeing are devastated by their existence; and how difficult it is to attenuate them.
While much has been uncovered about stigma, health, and risk, many questions remain. Among these include: How can one design messages that effectively alert the general public about imminent health threats and that successfully promote desirable behavioral changes without evoking stigma processes? How do different reactions to stigmatization influence targets and their social networks? What factors increase resistance or vulnerability to messages containing stigma-inducing content? How can one create an effective, reliable means to eliminate existing stigmas?
Credit Behaviors of Rural Households in the Perspective of Complex Social Networks
