The media are often blamed for widespread perceptions that welfare benefit claimants are undeserving in Anglo-Saxon countries – yet people rarely justify their views through media stories, instead saying that they themselves know undeserving claimants. In this paper, I explain this contradiction by hypothesising that the media shapes how we interpret ambiguous interpersonal contact. I focus on disability benefit claimants, which is an ideal case given that disability is often externally unobservable, and test three hypotheses over three studies (all using a purpose-collected survey in the UK and Norway, n=3,836). In Study 1, I find strong evidence that a randomly-assigned ‘benefits cheat’ story leads respondents to interpret a hypothetical disability claimant as less deserving. Study 2 examines people’s judgements in everyday life, finding that readers of more negative newspapers in the UK are much more likely to judge neighbours as non-genuine – but with effectively no impact on judgements of close family claimants, where ambiguity is lower. However, contra my expectations, in Study 3 I find that Britons are no more likely than Norwegians to perceive known claimants as non-genuine (despite more negative welfare discourses), partly because of different conceptions of what ‘non-genuineness’ means in the two countries.

中文翻译：

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多疑的性格？媒体对残疾福利申请人看法的影响

媒体经常被指责为普遍认为盎格鲁撒克逊国家的福利申请人不值得的观点，但人们很少通过媒体报道来证明自己的观点，而是说他们自己认识不值得的福利申请人。在本文中，我通过假设媒体塑造了我们如何解释模糊的人际接触来解释这一矛盾。我重点关注残疾福利索赔人，这是一个理想的案例，因为残疾通常是无法从外部观察到的，并在三项研究中测试了三个假设（全部使用在英国和挪威进行的有目的收集的调查，n=3,836）。在研究 1 中，我发现强有力的证据表明，随机分配的“福利欺骗”故事会导致受访者将假设的残疾索赔人解释为不太值得。研究 2 检查人们在日常生活中的判断，研究发现，英国负面报纸的读者更有可能判断邻居不真诚，但实际上这对近亲索赔人的判断没有影响，因为后者的模糊性较低。然而，与我的预期相反，在研究 3 中，我发现英国人并不比挪威人更可能将已知的主张者视为不真诚（尽管存在更多负面福利话语），部分原因是对“不真诚”的含义有不同的理解。 2个国家。