This experimental study examined the effects of biological explanations on individuals' stigma against children with ADHD. We randomly assigned 174 undergraduate students to read one of the three fictitious articles: the first article focused on the determining role of biology in affecting children's ADHD symptoms (biological determinist), the second article highlighted the interplay between biological and environmental factors (interactionist), and the third article was unrelated to ADHD (control). Analyses of variance showed that participants who read the biological determinist message, relative to the control group, were (a) less likely to blame the children for their problems, but (b) more likely to endorse fixed beliefs about the nature of ADHD (entity beliefs). Thus, the overall direct effect of biological determinist message on desire for social distance was not significant. By contrast, participants who read the interactionist message showed (a) less blame attribution and (b) lower levels of entity beliefs, which contributed to less desire for social distance. These findings suggest that (a) presenting biological information regarding ADHD in a deterministic way may not be an effective way to reduce stigma, whereas (b) providing an interactionist account of ADHD may undermine the potential negative effect of an exclusively biological explanation.

中文翻译：

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生物决定论和相互作用论因果解释对本科生注意力缺陷多动障碍儿童污名的影响：一项实验调查

这项实验研究检验了生物学解释对个体对多动症儿童的污名的影响。我们随机分配 174 名本科生阅读三篇虚构文章中的一篇：第一篇文章侧重于生物学在影响儿童多动症症状中的决定作用（生物决定论），第二篇文章强调了生物与环境因素之间的相互作用（相互作用论），第三篇文章与多动症（对照）无关。方差分析表明，相对于对照组，阅读生物决定论信息的参与者 (a) 不太可能将他们的问题归咎于孩子，但 (b) 更有可能认可关于 ADHD 本质的固定信念（实体信念）。因此，生物决定论信息对社会距离欲望的总体直接影响并不显着。相比之下，阅读互动信息的参与者表现出（a）较少的责备归因和（b）较低的实体信念水平，这有助于减少对社交距离的渴望。这些发现表明 (a) 以确定性的方式呈现有关 ADHD 的生物学信息可能不是减少耻辱感的有效方法，而 (b) 提供 ADHD 的互动解释可能会破坏完全生物学解释的潜在负面影响。