MENTAL HEALTH STIGMAS IN SACRIFICIAL MORAL DILEMMAS

This study explored how people make moral judgments about individuals who display behavioral symptoms of mental illness. Two processes underlie moral judgment: intuitions about what is right and wrong and the application of moral rules in action. In this study, I focused on intuitions about utilitarian moral judgment by asking participants to rate both how right and how wrong they felt it would be to sacrifice one person to save five others—the trolley problem. I also asked participants what they felt they would do in these unusual situations, because measures of moral action can differ considerably from measures of moral judgment. Participants were 431 psychology undergraduates who read multiple vignettes in which the moral dilemma differed based on who was the target to be sacrificed. Characters had the following disorders: PTSD, schizophrenia and substance use disorder (SUD). Participants displayed a positive bias in favor of the PTSD character and negative bias against one, but not all, characters with schizophrenia and the SUD character. In general, when presented with fictitious moral dilemmas, respondents reported being more likely to respond with inaction than to take an action to sacrifice a character. This study documents that some mental disorders are stigmatized while others are not. Knowing which disorders are stigmatized will help improve advocacy efforts for stigma reduction and allocate resources to disorders that are most stigmatized.