Research on Food Assistance Attitudes Shows People Overestimate Stigma Around Welfare

But correcting this misperception doesn’t necessarily boost applications

A persistent challenge for public assistance advocates and policymakers is the large number of individuals who are eligible for aid but don’t receive benefits.

In the realm of food insecurity, around 12% of individuals in 2022 who were eligible for the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program  — formerly known as food stamps — didn’t receive this help. That national average masks wider shortfalls in Texas (26%), California (20%) and Florida (20%). The gap is typically even wider for other welfare programs.

Identifying the main reasons for this consequential disconnect is obviously a key step to helping more eligible individuals get the support they qualify for. Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology builds a nuanced case that misperceptions about public stigma around welfare may lower uptake of SNAP benefits.

The University of Missouri-St. Louis’ Alice Lee-Yoon, UCLA Anderson’s Sherry J. Wu, Heather M. Caruso and Eugene M. Caruso, and California Faculty Association’s Jason C. Chin clearly show that, while we as individuals have generally positive feelings about food assistance programs, we simultaneously presume that the overriding public sentiment is far more negative. 

Overestimating Public Opinion

This represents a textbook case of “pluralistic ignorance” — a social phenomenon in which people privately believe one thing, but wrongly presume they’re in the minority. And when we’re worried about a belief that we think is outside the social norm, it can cause us to worry about what “others” think, which in turn, can shape behavior. If you are eligible for food assistance and want to use the program but are mistakenly convinced that the public has a negative opinion of welfare recipients, you might be less inclined to seek out the help.

To establish that welfare is impacted by this overestimation of public stigma, the researchers recruited nearly 600 participants on Mturk and asked them to rate attitudes toward SNAP-eligible individuals across seven distinct dimensions: disdain, negativity about help-seeking, pity, envy, happiness, admiration and willingness to help.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: rate their own attitudes (personal perspective), estimate the attitudes of colleagues (other Mturk participants) or estimate the attitude of the general public. The researchers rolled the seven dimensions into one average score: On a 7-point scale, participants rated their positive regard for SNAP-eligible individuals as 3.93 for their personal perspective, compared with 3.27 for their perception of colleagues’ attitudes (MTurk workers) and 3.22 for their perception of the general public’s attitudes. People rated themselves as significantly less negative and significantly more positive toward SNAP-eligible individuals than they believed others (MTurk workers or the general public) would be. ​ 

Among the seven individual dimensions, averaged feelings of disdain showed a wide perception gap: On a scale of 1-7, the 1.95 score people reported for their personal feeling of disdain regarding SNAP individuals was much lower than the 2.76 average level of disdain participants felt their colleagues would have and the 3.05 level for participants asked to estimate what “the public’s” level of disdain would be. Participants also gave a much higher score on their personal sense of happiness (toward people eligible for SNAP benefits) of 4.53, compared with the 3.77 average score for participants estimating colleagues’ perceptions and 3.63 among participants who estimated the public’s perception. 

The researchers note that these misperceptions may be a function of decades of political narratives about “welfare queens” and similar stereotypes that, while persistent in media and policy discourse, don’t seem to reflect current public opinion. The researchers also found that liberals showed stronger pluralistic ignorance than conservatives, initially overestimating stigma by larger margins.

Trying to Move the Needle

In their next phase of the research, the authors tested whether they could tamp down this dynamic with a simple intervention: having people read an article that reported the generally positive public attitudes toward SNAP.  

The researchers had a subset of nearly 1,300 participants read such an article. A control group read an article explaining the low uptake of SNAP among eligible individuals and the possibility that public stigma may be part of the problem. A third group did not receive any information. The group that had been fed actual factual information about attitudes toward SNAP reported the lowest level of perceived stigma (3.6) compared with the two other groups (3.85 and 3.88). Moreover, the group that was explicitly given information that showed there was not widespread public welfare stigma expressed greater willingness to (hypothetically) apply for SNAP themselves (rising from 5.62 to 5.98 on a 7-point scale) and to recommend the program to friends (from 5.81 to 6.09).

Those results suggest that addressing misperceptions about public stigma around welfare benefits and welfare recipients could be an important lever to improve uptake. But in a similar study that replaced a general pool of participants with nearly 1,600 Californians who are eligible for (but not enrolled in) in the state’s SNAP-funded food assistance program, learning that public stigma is not really a thing had limited impact. 

Participants in this study indeed reported a lower level of belief that there was a public stigma after reading the article, but these participants didn’t show any increased willingness to apply for aid or refer someone to the program. 

This intervention’s failure as a stand-alone catalyst to get more eligible individuals to consider applying for aid is nonetheless an extremely valuable finding. Importantly, the researchers’ statistical analysis provides clear proof that reducing the perception of public stigma can in fact reduce that concern among individuals eligible for aid. And the fact that it doesn’t change behavior provides valuable addition-by-subtraction insight that perception of public stigma is not the single most important issue. 

The researchers draw on past research to offer up a few likely suspects for what those other roadblocks might be. They note that internalized personal shame may need to be addressed separately. It’s one thing to realize your neighbors might be supportive of food assistance, but some eligible individuals may also grapple with their own demons around accepting the aid.

More fundamentally, the study points to the pervasive problem with welfare programs: the need to reduce or better manage the administrative hurdles that make the application process laborious and often impractical. Just imagine asking for time off from a job so you can attend an interview that’s part of the approval process for SNAP, juggling that appointment with child care, filling out a detailed online-only application when all you have is a phone or needing a stable address as a prerequisite for receiving aid. 

The research suggests eligible individuals may be acutely aware of these practical obstacles in ways that make stigma concerns secondary.