D567 Task 1 Social Issue Attitude Analysis Example

What the Person Behind Me in Line Assumed: How Attitudes Toward People Who Use SNAP Benefits Form, Persist and Might Change

Student Name

Leavitt School of Health, Western Governors University

D567: Social Psychology, Task 1

Course Instructor

Month Day, Year

What the Person Behind Me in Line Assumed: How Attitudes Toward People Who Use SNAP Benefits Form, Persist and Might Change

Introduction

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, helps low-income households buy food and served about 42 million people in an average month of fiscal year 2023 (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, 2024). Few public programs are judged as quickly by strangers, and few judgments are made with so little information. Opinions about who uses SNAP and why often form at a grocery checkout, in a news story or at a family dinner, long before anyone looks at data. This paper uses social psychology to analyze attitudes toward SNAP recipients. It explains the issue, applies major theories to how those attitudes develop and persist, reflects on the roots of my own beliefs, and considers what research suggests could change them.

The Social Issue

SNAP benefits are loaded onto an electronic card used like a debit card. Many recipients are children, older adults or people with disabilities, and many households that receive benefits include someone who works. Even so, public debate often centers on a small number of images: a shopper buying expensive food, someone who could work but does not, or fraud. These images feed attitudes that shape policy votes, how cashiers and other shoppers treat people at checkout, and whether eligible families apply at all. Stigma is often cited as one reason eligible people do not enroll, which means an attitude held by bystanders can have real effects on children's nutrition.

How Attitudes Toward SNAP Recipients Develop

An attitude is an evaluation of a person, group or idea that has emotional, behavioral and cognitive parts. Social psychology offers several explanations for how negative attitudes toward SNAP recipients form.

Stereotype content. The stereotype content model proposes that people judge social groups along two dimensions, warmth and competence, and that the combination predicts emotion and behavior. In the studies that introduced the model, welfare recipients and poor people were among the few groups rated low on both dimensions, a combination linked to contempt (Fiske et al., 2002). That pattern helps explain why attitudes toward SNAP users can be so harsh compared with attitudes toward other people who receive government help, such as retirees drawing Social Security, who tend to be rated as warm.

Attribution. When people explain someone else's situation, they tend to overweight personal traits and underweight circumstances, a tendency called the correspondence bias or fundamental attribution error (Gilbert & Malone, 1995). A shopper who sees an EBT card is likely to infer something about the user's effort or choices rather than consider a job loss, a medical crisis or wages that do not cover rent and food. The same shopper, explaining his own hard times, would likely point to circumstances.

Media and social learning. Attitudes are also learned from others. Gilens (1999) analyzed decades of news coverage and survey data and argued that the way poverty was portrayed in news magazines and on television, including whose faces appeared in stories about welfare, shaped public beliefs about who receives assistance and whether they deserve it. Attitudes learned this way are repeated in conversation and reinforced by people whose approval matters to us.

Why the Attitudes Persist

Once formed, these attitudes resist evidence. Confirmation bias leads people to notice and remember the rare story of misuse while ignoring the ordinary majority of transactions. Belief in a just world, the idea that people generally get what they deserve, makes it psychologically comfortable to see poverty as earned. Group norms add pressure: in a family or workplace where SNAP users are mocked, expressing a different view carries a social cost, so people conform publicly and sometimes privately as well.

Reflection on My Own Assumptions

Analyzing this issue required looking at where my own views came from. I grew up hearing an uncle complain about people buying steak with food stamps, and as a teenager working a grocery register I remember noticing what EBT customers bought far more than what cash customers bought. At the time, none of it registered as an opinion; it felt like simply noticing. Looking back, I see the correspondence bias at work, since I never learned anything about those customers beyond their card, and confirmation bias, since I remembered the few purchases that fit my uncle's story and forgot the hundreds of carts full of bread, milk and cereal.

My attitude changed only when my own family used SNAP for five months after my mother's hours were cut during a hospital restructuring. I felt the looks at checkout from the other side. That experience fits research on intergroup contact: a meta-analysis of more than 500 studies found that contact between groups generally reduces prejudice, and that the effect often extends beyond the individuals involved to the group as a whole (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). My contact was personal and unplanned, but it did what a statistic could not.

What Could Change Attitudes

Research points to several approaches. Contact, as noted above, reduces prejudice most when people meet on equal footing and work toward shared goals, so community programs that bring volunteers and recipients together as neighbors, rather than as givers and receivers, may help. Accurate information presented through individual stories can counter the vivid exceptions that dominate memory. Framing matters as well: describing SNAP in terms of warmth and shared values, such as feeding children and supporting working families, speaks directly to the warmth dimension on which recipients are misjudged. Program design can lower the social cost of using benefits as well. The move from paper coupons to electronic cards, completed nationwide by 2004, made benefits far less visible at the register, and online purchasing with SNAP, piloted in 2019 and widely expanded during the pandemic, removes the checkout moment altogether for many families.

Conclusion

Attitudes toward SNAP recipients form through stereotypes low in warmth and competence, attributions that ignore circumstances, and media images learned and repeated in social groups. Confirmation bias, just-world beliefs and group norms keep them in place. My own attitude shifted through contact, which the research suggests is one of the most reliable paths to change.

References

Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(6), 878-902. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.6.878

Gilbert, D. T., & Malone, P. S. (1995). The correspondence bias. Psychological Bulletin, 117(1), 21-38. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.1.21

Gilens, M. (1999). Why Americans hate welfare: Race, media, and the politics of antipoverty policy. University of Chicago Press.

Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751-783. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. (2024). Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participation and costs. https://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap