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Psychiatric labels in the military setting: Some consequences on other persons'causality attribution of personal and situational factors
Author(s) -
LARSSON GERRY,
STARRIN BENGT
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1983.tb00475.x
Subject(s) - attribution , situational ethics , psychology , perspective (graphical) , causality (physics) , perception , military service , psychiatry , military personnel , human factors and ergonomics , clinical psychology , poison control , social psychology , medical emergency , medicine , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , computer science , political science , law , history
About eight percent of all male Swedish eighteen‐year‐olds are exempted from military service on a psychiatric basis annually. From the perspective of the labelling theory of mental illness, the aim of this paper was to study some consequences on other people's perception of individuals who have been exempted on this basis. An experiment was performed with two different groups of subjects; 81 conscripts and 61 students of personnel administration. The subjects were to listen to a tape‐recorded description of a car accident and to evaluate its causes. A brief description of the life history of the driver was given which included a “label”. It was foud that with a psychiatric exemption label the accident was attribuited significantly more to factors internal to the driver than to external factors, as compared to a general problems‐living label.