The Animalistic Dehumanization Effect Of College Students On AIDS

It’s a process of dehumanization to see people as objects or treat objects as human beings and deny the attributes of human beings. Previous studies have found that there is a stigma phenomenon exist in the AIDS patients, that is, AIDS patients may be subject to degrading stereotypes. On the basis of previous research, our research is to investigate whether AIDS patients are stereotyped as animal-like and whether these associations would be independent of established stereotype contend dimensions by adjective ratings.The first research mainly examines the content of the stereotype of AIDS, and the similarity of the animality in the stereotypes of AIDS with the content of the model of stereotype. According to the analysis the evaluation results of 40 traits, we found that college students exist stereotype to AIDS, they thought that AIDS patients are insecure, sensitive, nervous, anxious, impulsive, disorder, ignorant and rude. This research also indicate that the AIDS patient and animal stereotype were correlated positively (r=0.38, p<0.05)The second research adopt another traits to explore the relationship between the animality in the stereotypes of AIDS and the two of the stereotype content model. This research repeat the result of research 1. According to the result of analysis of correlation, related significantly between the stereotype content of warmth and competence (r=0.756, p<0.05). Related significantly between competence and the animality (r=-0.290, p<0.05), however, warmth failed to correlate with the animal stereotype (r=-0.226, p=0.08). We also found that the stereotype of AIDS was significantly correlated with low warmth, low competence and the animal stereotype. According to the hierarchical linear regression analyses, it demonstrates that animality is independent of the well-established dimensions on stereotype content, thus, animality would be an independent predictor of the stereotype of AIDS.According to the above results, our research has the following conclusions:First, college students exist in patients with HIV/AIDS stereotypes;Second, the stereotype of the AIDS are similar to the stereotype of animals;Third, animality in the stereotype of the AIDS is independent of the well-established dimensions on stereotype content.