As a social psychologist at a liberal-arts college, I try to help students recognize, and perhaps overcome, stereotyped expectations about diverse social groups. About 20 years ago, after working on a study of how amputees adjusted to their condition, I became interested in how people with disabilities — let’s call them insiders — are sometimes judged by outsiders, or nondisabled people. (Some rehabilitation professionals use those terms to emphasize that those two categories are socially constructed. Specifically, I wondered whether, and how, outsiders could come to better understand insiders’ actual experiences. A few years ago I had an opportunity to carry out some experiments aimed at helping people broaden their perspectives.
Two of my former students, David Fisher and Brittany Beard, and I wondered: Could outsiders come to see disability as a positive quality? Could they, if only briefly, appreciate and maybe even understand a little about the experience of insiders?
Welcome to The Chronicle’s first special report devoted to age diversity on campuses. This annual issue also features compelling personal essays dealing with identity and disability — be sure to check them out.
More than four decades ago, the rehabilitation psychologist Beatrice Wright, whose work stressed the importance of portraying people with disabilities as individuals rather than conditions, developed an exercise that is still timely today. She called it the mine/thine problem: The idea was to examine the consequences of having nondisabled participants adopt the perspective of both insiders and outsiders regarding their own self-identified “disability.”
In the first of two experiments, 52 adults from our campus community signed up for a single session. Following Wright’s instructions, they were told that “everyone is handicapped in some way” and that they should identify in themselves any physical, mental, emotional, or other quality they viewed as disabling. Each person wrote his or her disability on a slip of paper. All entries were then randomly paired — “autoimmune disease” with “shyness,” for example — and the pairs were projected onto a classroom screen. Participants were then asked to respond to this prompt: If it were possible, would you prefer to keep your own disability, or the one with which it was randomly paired? We asked them to put a star by their chosen disability.
Like Wright, we found that a large majority (78 percent) chose to keep their own disability. In other words, most were reluctant to trade “mine” (their own disabling quality) for “thine” (someone else’s). When asked why, many expressed concern about navigating daily life with an unfamiliar condition. In other words, when thinking like insiders, people are more at ease with the disability they know. It is part of their identity.
We later redesigned and repeated the study with 50 different people, adding two additional questions. First, does taking part in the exercise lead to more positive attitudes toward disability? To find out, participants completed a survey on disability three times: one week before the exercise, immediately after the exercise, and two weeks later. We also wanted to know if the severity of the paired disability mattered, so half of the disabilities listed were paired with more-severe disabilities, and those remaining were paired with less-severe disabilities. A separate sample of 96 people rated 78 disabilities on a nine-point scale, where higher average ratings indicated a perception of greater severity. For example, blindness (average rating of 8.01) was rated as more severe than colorblindness (2.34) or stuttering (3.28).
Having a disability does not necessarily mean someone cannot live a good life.
Our second study’s findings replicated those of the first: 90 percent of our participants reclaimed their own disability, which meant that the severity of the paired disabilities had no effect on their choices. What about beliefs? Did taking part in the exercise change participants’ attitudes toward disabled people? Yes, indeed: Compared with their pre-exercise opinions, participants’ attitudes toward people with disabilities were more favorable immediately after the exercise and even two weeks later.
F or many insiders, then, disability is part and parcel of who they are; where congenital disabilities are concerned, to paraphrase Lady Gaga (and I don’t do so lightly), they were born this way. Disability is but one aspect of their lives, something they don’t often think about unless prompted — by a missing curb cut in the sidewalk that makes navigating a wheelchair a problem, or a well-intentioned, if inappropriate, comment from a stranger. (“Wow, you’re so brave to cross that street by yourself without any help!”)
Outsiders often presume that a disability must be an awful, humiliating, all-encompassing experience. They believe disability must be a preoccupation for insiders, one that precludes them from leading interesting, normal, or even happy lives.
Of course, the actual experience of people with disabilities can be quite different. And since quality of life is influenced by a variety of factors, including mental health, physical health, stress, and the support of family and friends, having a disability does not necessarily mean someone cannot live a good life.
As a colleague of mine who has a disability puts it, ‘disability is our normal.’
So, why do outsiders focus so much on disability itself rather than the person — the insider — with the disability? Well, we are drawn to how people look. Social psychology is replete with cases where people associate physical characteristics with a person’s demeanor or even abilities. (Remember when then-candidate Donald Trump mocked a reporter with a disability during the 2016 presidential campaign?) Another explanation is that outsiders confuse “becoming disabled” with “being disabled.” The former is imagined as a tragic, traumatic event (which it may have been) that becomes conflated with the latter as an ongoing state. Being disabled — living with a disability over the long run — is not necessarily the same thing as a disabling event. As a colleague of mine who has a disability puts it, “disability is our normal.”
I like the mine/thine exercise because students in my courses are always surprised by the results, which give them a lot to talk and think about. I also like it because it lacks some of the falseness I fear occurs in common disability simulations. Blindfolding people and then leading them around, for example, doesn’t really mimic a lifetime of blindness, nor does roaming campus in a wheelchair ensure that users realize the physical world is largely designed for the able-bodied. Such demonstrations are designed for outsiders by outsiders. I’m not suggesting that the mine/thine approach provides genuine insight into the experience of insiders, but it is one way to begin constructive discussions and, perhaps, to temper some stereotypes about disability.
Dana S. Dunn is a professor of psychology at Moravian College and the author of The Social Psychology of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2014).
