Increasing safety net program uptake through stigma reduction скачать в хорошем качестве

Increasing safety net program uptake through stigma reduction

Government programs provide a critical safety net for millions of Americans, but their success depends on who accesses benefits. This talk will focus on the role of stigma, an often-cited, but understudied barrier to take-up of safety net programs. We show in two field experiments (N = 117,073) and three online experiments (N = 1,751) that the stigma associated with government rental assistance is a significant barrier to take-up. Yet, a one-time communication that reduced internalized stigma increased applications by nearly 40%, and yielded a 50% increase in applications from Black and African-American renters. This research offers some of the first evidence of the causal impact of stigma in a real-world setting and demonstrates that internalized stigma can be reduced even in the presence of pervasive societal stigma.