SOCIAL BEHAVIOR AND PERSONALITY, 2012, 40(2), 251-258 © Society for Personality Research http://dx.doi.org/10.2224/sbp.2012.40.2.251

SOCIAL AXIOMS AND IMPLICIT ATTITUDES ABOUT PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

LILI MA, SHUANG CHEN, MINGJIE ZHOU, AND JIANXIN ZHANG Chinese Academy of Sciences

We investigated the relationship between social axioms and implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities. Participants were 101 undergraduate students (male = 30, female = 71) from a university in Beijing. Social axioms were assessed using the Social Axioms Survey (Leung et al., 2002) and implicit attitudes were measured using the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). Data analysis showed that the social axiom dimension of fate control was negatively related to implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities. None of the other 4 social axiom dimensions was found to be correlated with implicit attitudes.

Keywords: social axiom, fate control, implicit attitude, people with disabilities.

Beliefs are key concepts in social , which vary across a continuum of specificity (Hahn, 1973). Some beliefs tend to be textured and domain specific, whereas others may be viewed as generalized expectancies, such as the concept of locus of control (Rotter, 1966). Recently, Leung and colleagues developed a framework of general beliefs called social axioms. Social axioms are generalized statements about oneself, the social and physical environment, or the spiritual world (Leung et al., 2002). A five-factor structure of general beliefs or social axioms was established through data collected from 40 cultures worldwide. These five factors were labeled: social cynicism, social complexity, reward for application, religiosity, and fate control. Briefly put, social cynicism represents a negative view of human nature and a malevolent view of the social world. Social complexity represents the belief that problems have multiple solutions

Lili Ma, Shuang Chen, and Mingjie Zhou, Institute of Psychology and Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Jianxin Zhang, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Please address correspondence and reprint requests to: Lili Ma, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 52 Sanlihe Road, Beijing 100864, People’s Republic of China. Email: [email protected]

251 252 IMPLICIT ATTITUDES TOWARD PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES and that people’s behavior may vary across situations. Reward for application represents the belief that people’s use of effort, knowledge, careful planning, and other resources will lead to positive outcomes. Fate control represents a belief in predetermined life outcomes along with the paradoxical belief that people have some ways to influence these externally originating outcomes. Religiosity represents a belief in the beneficial functions of religious practices and institutions for the well-being of individuals and the communities they comprise (Leung & Bond, 2004). These axioms could be used to guide behavior in different contexts, and the predictive power of social axioms has been demonstrated in subsequent studies (Bond, Au, Tong, & Chemonges-Nielson, 2004; Chen, Bond, & Tang, 2007; Safdar, Lewis, & Daneshpour, 2006). Social axioms play a central and organizing role in people’s belief systems. Leung et al. (2002) described how social axioms serve four major functions of attitude, that is, they facilitate the attainment of important goals (instrumental), help people protect their self-worth (ego-defensive), serve as a manifestation of people’s values (value-expressive), and help people understand the world (knowledge). These four major functions enhance people’s functioning in their social and physical environment. Hui, Bond, and Ng (2006) demonstrated that social axioms served as a useful defensive mechanism against death anxiety. In relation to the five factors of social axioms, a stronger religious belief and a weaker belief in fate control were associated with less anxiety about death, and belief in fate control partially mediated the relationship between death ideation and death anxiety (Hui, Bond, & Ng, 2006). However, these research findings were based on self-report measurements. Greenwald and Banaji (1995) established that much social cognition occurs in an implicit mode, and explicit and implicit attitudes are often dissociated. Explicit attitudes are judgments or evaluations that are well established in awareness and implicit attitudes are manifest in actions or judgments under the control of automatically activated evaluation, without the performer’s awareness of that causation (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). In the current study, we investigated the role social axioms play in the formation of implicit attitudes. Explicit attitudes are most often accessed by direct measures like rating scales. The most widely used measure of implicit attitudes is the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) in which individuals’ implicit associations between constructs are measured by assessing how easily these constructs are mapped on to one another. Traditionally, attitudes toward people with disabilities have been assessed by means of questionnaires such as the Attitudes Toward Disabled Persons Scale (ATDP; Yuker, Block, & Campbell, 1960) and the Scale of Attitudes Toward Disabled Persons (SADP; Antonak, 1982). The ATDP is used to assess unidimensional attitudes about people with disabilities on a positive to negative continuum, whereas the SADP is a multidimensional instrument used to assess IMPLICIT ATTITUDES TOWARD PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES 253 disability attitudes in terms of three components: optimism-concern for human rights, behavioral misconceptions, and pessimism-hopelessness. The results of explicit and implicit measures have often been dissociated or not correlated with each other, and the Implicit Associations Test (IAT) has also been used to measure implicit attitudes toward this group (Pruett & Chan, 2006; Thomas, Vaughn, & Doyle, 2005; White, Jackson, & Gordon, 2006). No congruent results were recorded by these researchers. In the present study we investigated the role of social axioms in the formation of implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities. Previous researchers (Navarre & Minton, 1977) have found that individuals with an external, as opposed to an internal, locus of control tend to be more aware of disabilities and find physical disability more debilitating. Those with an external locus of control were more prone to evaluate a physically disabled person negatively, whereas the evaluations of those with an internal locus of control were not affected by the presence of a disability (Navarre & Minton, 1977). In relation to social axioms, fate control has been found to be positively correlated with external locus of control (Singelis, Hubbard, Her, & An, 2003). Fate control combines locus of control, predictability, and fatedness and is concerned with one’s belief about how, or if, one can control the events happening to oneself. Thus, in this study, we hypothesized that fate control would be negatively correlated with implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities. In relation to the other dimensions, previous researchers have found that stronger religious belief and weaker belief in fate control were associated with lower death anxiety (Hui et al., 2006). Moreover, people’s ethnic and religious beliefs were found to be related to their opinions about disability (Pfeiffer et al., 2004). It was, therefore, assumed that a stronger religious belief would lead to a more negative implicit attitude toward people with disabilities.

Method

Participants Participants were 30 male and 71 female undergraduate students (N = 101) with an average age of 21 years from a university in Beijing. Among the group 57 were from urban areas, 43 from rural areas, and 1 participant did not record his/her place of residence.

Measures and Procedure Participants were recruited by means of flyers posted on noticeboards in the university. All participants volunteered to take part and at the end of the test each was paid, debriefed, and thanked. Implicit attitude toward people with disabilities was measured using the Implicit Associations Test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998). 254 IMPLICIT ATTITUDES TOWARD PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES The IAT is an assessment tool designed to measure a person’s discriminative implicit appraisal of groups of individuals. In the IAT, stimuli are presented one at a time and participants are asked to categorize each of these as quickly and as accurately as possible, according to a concept or an attribute dimension, by pressing the corresponding left or right key on a computer keyboard. In our study, the IAT task consisted of seven blocks of trials. In the first step, symbols representing people with disabilities and people without disabilities (disabled vs. nondisabled) were presented (left [D] = nondisabled, right [K] = disabled). In the second step, positive and negative words were presented (e.g., left [D] = positive, right [K] = negative). In the third step, nondisabled and disabled symbols and positive and negative words were presented alternately and randomly in different trials (e.g., left [D] = nondisabled/positive, right [K] = disabled/negative). The fourth step was the same as the third step. In the fifth step, the key assignment for disabled/nondisabled people was reversed (e.g., left [D] = disabled, right [K] = nondisabled). In the sixth, the key assignment for positive and negative words was reversed (e.g., left [D] = disabled/positive, right [K] = nondisabled/ negative). The seventh step was the same as the sixth step. For the seven steps in the trials, only steps 4 and 7 were the critical trials for the IAT, and the other five steps were used for practice. The speed of responses in steps 4 and 7 is dependent on the strength of the association between target and attribute assigned to the same key (e.g., nondisabled and positive). The order in which the participants performed the mixed categorization blocks of key assignment (i.e., blocks 3–4 and 6–7) was counterbalanced. On completion of the computer task, participants were debriefed and thanked. Fate control was measured using the Social Axioms Survey (SAS; Leung et al., 2002). For the 60-item SAS, there are 10 items used to investigate belief in fate control. Fate control was derived from eight items (e.g., ‘‘Fate determines one’s successes and failures’’). Each item was scored on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).The internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) of this scale was 0.85.

Results

Prior to analysis, following the recommendations of Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz (1998), very short responses (< 300 ms) were recoded to 300 ms, and very long responses (> 3,000 ms) were recoded to 3,000 ms. One participant was excluded because they had made a large number (> 20%) of errors. One other participant’s data were not included in the analysis because of the presence of outliers (more than 3 standard deviations above the mean of the total group). The IAT effect was then computed. Positive values for “Dinf” (value higher than 0) indicate negative implicit attitudes, while negative values indicate positive IMPLICIT ATTITUDES TOWARD PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES 255 attitudes; larger numbers indicate stronger implicit attitudes. Data results (Dinf value range: 0.23–1.45) indicated that implicit attitude toward people with disabilities was negative (M = .96, SD = .28). No gender difference was found for the IAT effect. The correlations between social axioms and implicit attitude toward people with disabilities are shown in Table 1. Implicit attitude was correlated with the social axiom dimension of fate control (r = -0.29), but none of the other four dimensions was found to have a statistically significant correlation.

Table 1. Correlation Among Variables

1 2 3 4 5 6 1. IAT effect – 2. Social cynicism -.07 – 3. Social complexity -.03 .24* – 4. Reward for application -.05 .17 .42** – 5. Religiosity -.12 .10 .33* .30** – 6. Fate control -.29** .43** .20 .34** .36** – Note: * p < .05, ** p < .01. Discussion In the present study, we investigated the relationships between social axioms and implicit attitude toward people with disabilities. Results demonstrated that the social axiom dimension of fate control was negatively correlated with implicit attitude, while religious belief was not associated with implicit attitude. Fate control relates to the degree to which important outcomes in life are believed to be fated and under the control of impersonal forces, but still are predictable and alterable (Leung & Bond, 2004). According to Leung et al. (2002) fate control seems to relate to locus of control, yet they are different concepts in that fate control includes the additional theme that events are both predetermined and that there are some ways for people to influence these outcomes (Leung et al., 2002). Previous researchers have found that fate control is related to a higher death rate caused by heart disease and a coping style of distancing characterized by being passive and the avoidance of thinking about difficulties (Leung et al., 2007). Fate control has also been found to be correlated negatively with traditional Christian beliefs, and positively with spiritual beliefs, supernatural beliefs, and belief in precognition (Singelis et al., 2003). In our analysis, fate control was found to be related to unconscious negative attitudes toward people with disabilities. It is possible that concern over events that are out of one’s control makes people feel anxious about uncontrollable life events like disabilities. Further, it has been found that Asian family members commonly 256 IMPLICIT ATTITUDES TOWARD PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES perceive disability as being a burden and undesirable to the family (Chan, Lee, Yuen, & Chan, 2002), and this phenomenon may be strongly influenced by the philosophical or religious teachings of Buddhism and Taoism, especially in China. For example, Buddhism teaches that a person with a painful disability has this as a result of their own past actions or sins. So participants who gained high scores on fate control were less likely to exhibit a negative implicit attitude toward people with disabilities. Religious belief was found not to be related to implicit attitudes. We speculate the reason may lie in the meaning of the items assessing religious belief (e.g., ‘‘Belief in a religion helps one understand the meaning of life’’). Spirituality refers to belief in the existence of supernatural factors and in the impact of religion on people’s lives. Participants who gained high scores on spirituality do not necessarily have strong religious beliefs or faith. Our study has several limitations. First, we measured only implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities. Although implicit attitude was found to be correlated to fate control, we did not test explicit attitude and the relationship between explicit attitude toward people with disabilities and social axioms is unknown. As implicit and explicit measurements relate to different aspects of attitude, it is likely that their functioning mechanisms are quite different (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Explicit attitude measurements should be used to explore how social axioms function in the formation of attitudes toward people with disabilities. Secondly, we conducted the study in China, and participants were all college students. Future researchers could extend the sampling to other cultural backgrounds and other populations. In addition, we included only the variable of sex in relation to demographics. In future studies, participants’ regional and ethnic variables should also be included. Additionally, we did not find an association between religious belief and implicit attitude toward people with disabilities. We reasoned that this may have been due to the wording of the item tapping religious belief. As previous researchers have shown, people who have strong religious beliefs tend to view people with disabilities more positively, so future researchers should investigate the relationship between religious beliefs and spirituality. Finally, people with disabilities represent a social minority group, and previous researchers have demonstrated that attitudes toward people with disabilities are often colored by negative stereotype and bias. Based on our results, people who believed strongly in fate control were found to hold less negative implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities than did people who did not believe in fate control. It is hoped that the results of our study will help in understanding how to enhance the social status and quality of life of people with disabilities. In addition, it is well known that locus of control is related to a wide variety of behaviors. Fate control, which combines locus of control, predictability, and fatedness, has obvious behavioral implications for IMPLICIT ATTITUDES TOWARD PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES 257 taking action to influence those outcomes believed to be uncontrollable. It would be interesting to investigate the relationships between other axiom dimensions and behavioral tendencies toward people with disabilities.

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