HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa: An examination of how stigma affects United States college students' perceptions of HIV-infected populations and the responsibility of the United States to provide assistance

The HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa is a global crisis that can only be alleviated by vast monetary funds (World Bank, 2000). It is argued that by understanding Americans' perceptions of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, political will can be created toward the giving of United States funds toward health care for HIV infected individuals in sub-Saharan Africa and HIV prevention programs to limit the spread of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. Experiment I examined participants' knowledge of HIV/AIDS in United States and sub-Saharan Africa. Results showed participants overestimated the number of individuals infected with HIV and percentage of world's HIV population in the United States and underestimated the number of individuals infected with HIV and percentage of world's HIV population in sub-Saharan Africa, thus implying that participants were using an availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1982). An in-group bias (Blaine, 2000) was found only for participants' ratings of United States responsibility to provide funds for HIV prevention programs. Experiment II examined how stigma may affect attitudes of United States college students towards specific HIV infected individuals perceived as high in responsibility for HIV infection (e.g. commercial sex worker infected by client, man infected by commercial sex worker, man infected by man), and low in responsibility (e.g. wife infected by husband, and child infected by mothers' breast milk) in sub-Saharan Africa. Results indicated that responsibility for acquiring the HIV virus affected how these different HIV infected individuals were viewed, and how deserving they were of health care (Weiner, 1995). No gender differences based on the mode of HIV contraction were found, although female participants displayed more positive emotion toward the HIV infected individual, regardless of mode of HIV transmission, and thought the HIV infected individual was more deserving of HIV/AIDS health care than male participants. Implications of all results were discussed as to how they apply to educating Americans about the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa.