Measuring the strength of aporophobic pre-experimental derived relations on undergraduate students.

• Grant number: 23/08396-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2023
• End date: September 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology
• Principal Investigator: João Henrique de Almeida
• Grantee: Cleodon Lucas dos Santos Júnior
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências (FC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Bauru. Bauru , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Poverty has significantly increased, especially in Latin America, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and the most affected groups are minorities. This great inequality situation results in stigmas and prejudices against people living in poverty, which inevitably worsens their situation, affecting important variables that could help them in avoiding this condition and often leading to psychological suffering. This stigma is known as Aporophobia and can be explained by Behavior Analysis as a derived relationship between stimuli that, due to individuals' life histories, may manifest as stronger or weaker, thus contributing to the observation of this undesirable response pattern. Current Experiment's purpose is to observe the extent to which this type of stigmatization is present among university students. For this purpose, 20 university students from an institution in the iSão Paulo countryside will be invited to participate in the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), where they will be presented with photos of homeless men and affluent men, paired with adjectives describing competence and ability-related characteristics. It is expected that this experiment will verify the instrument's sensitivity to this type of social bias, thus enhancing the future development of interventions to reduce such prejudices.