The fear seems to override logic. In a recent study, researchers at Arizona State University asked several hundred business and science majors how they would feel about dining with silver-ware used by AIDS patients on the previous day (and then washed), the previous week and as much as a year ago. Although they were well informed factually about HIV infection, the majority admitted they would feel some fingering unease even after a year. “People don’t want to touch people with AIDS or share their dishes” even when they know they’re being irrational, says clinical psychologist Carol Nemeroff, who headed the study.
This resistance to reason is underscored in a 1993 book, “The Social Psychology of HIV Infection.” One chapter, by Illinois State University coeditors John Pryor and Glenn Reeder, cites a hard-to-believe AIDS scare that ruffled a New Jersey town a few years ago: a driverless car, in which a man who said he had open AIDS lesions had been a passenger, knocked down a neighbor’s fence post. Police at the scene advised the neighbor to wash with a disinfectant. She quickly spread the word in the community. The next day she and 10 other parents removed their children from the school, the same one the AIDS patient’s children attended.
Did the police, or the woman, think the car (or the fence post) had picked up an HIV infection? Or was it just that she was a neighbor of the AIDS carrier–with whom, incidentally, she had had no known physical contact? Pryor, a social psychologist at Illinois State, thinks the average person has a profound negative bias toward AIDS. In an odd reversal, the disease has been stigmatized by its victims, the majority of whom are believed to be homosexuals and IV drug users. That helps account for the glitch in logic. “When people have these kinds of reactions and are confronted with them–‘Hey, this is illogical’–they understand what you’re saying and have them anyway,” says Pryor. “They’ll be asked, ‘Well, do you think you can really contract HIV this way?’ They’ll say ’no,’ but it brings to mind things they just don’t want to think about-homosexuality, death, drugs.”
Nemeroff and her colleagues think a key factor in the bias is “sympathetic magic”–the belief, commonly found in traditional cultures, that when two objects meet, the characteristics of one can be transmitted to the other. In magical thinking, Nemeroff says, “there’s no distinction between moral and physical properties. Evil is considered just as transmissible as hepatitis.” In a recent study examining attitudes toward germs, Nemeroff had people draw pictures of them and rate how threatening they looked. It turned out, she says, that the pictures they drew of germs connected with people they disliked were scarier looking. “Bad people have worse germs; the source is what counts.” In an experiment that perfectly encapsulated that finding, subjects were asked how they would feel about eating an ice cream already begun by somebody else. “Most of them didn’t even want it from a spouse,” says Nemeroff. “But it was fine if it came from Albert Schweitzer.” Why was that? she asked. One woman replied, “I can’t believe he’d have any germs–or, no, they’d be good germs,” then added, “I can’t believe I said that.”
By such reckonings, AIDS is a “bad” disease carried by bad people. Psychologists, of course, recognize that much of the concern about AIDS is legitimate. An attitude study by psychologists Gregory Herek and Eric Glunt found that many Americans are unconvinced by assurances from public-health officials that there is little likelihood of contracting the disease casually. Instead, they seize on what likelihood there is. As one participant in a focus group put it: “If the odds are a thousand to one, who wants to be the one?”
But the capper to the attitude muddle is that all this AIDS angst, apparently, is not prompting greater caution. Outside the highest-risk groups, meaning homosexual and bisexual males and IV drug users, there has been relatively little change in sexual behavior. “What we’re seeing,” say the Arizona State group, “is a combination of extreme overreactions to casual contact side by side with serious underreactions to actual risk.” Psychologists offer various explanations–for one, the tendency of many people to take only the most convenient precautions. But the only solution they can offer is more and better education. That means health workers have their work cut out for them. Herek and Glunt found that in their focus group, “many discussants gave equal weight to all sources. Statements by a telephone caller to a radio talk show were assigned the same credibility as those made by a scientist or health official.” To get their message across, AIDS educators may have to phone it in.
