It’s Not Your Fault : Reducing Stigma Increases Take-up of Government Programs

Government programs provide a critical safety net for millions of low-income Americans, but their success depends on who accesses benefits. This research examines the role of stigma, an often-cited, but understudied barrier to take-up of safety net programs. Across two field experiments (N = 117,073) and two online experiments (N = 1,258), we show that subtle changes to the language used to describe one highly stigmatized benefit—emergency rental assistance—can reduce the internalized stigma associated with the program and, in turn, yield meaningful gains in take-up. A one-time communication that used de-stigmatizing language increased interest in rental assistance by 36% compared to providing information only, and increased program applications by about 11%, with likely larger effects for Black and African-American renters. This research offers some of the first causal evidence of the impact of stigma on participation in critical safety net programs, and demonstrates that internalized stigma can be reduced even in the presence of pervasive societal stigma