Six disabled people of color on the rooftop deck.
Source: Disabled and Here / Creative Commons License
Co-authors: Dr. Kathleen R. Bogart and Sidney Robertson
Imagine you’re having a job interview. You’re nervous and you’re not sure how you compare to the other interviewers, but you know you’re qualified. During the interview, you notice that the interviewer interrupts you to ask short yes or no questions, then lets you go after less than 10 minutes. You start to wonder, “Is this because of my disability?” This is something that some members of the disability community have experienced. While people with disabilities face many forms of prejudice and discrimination, some of these behaviors can be specifically attributed to the illness-avoidance model.
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What is the disease avoidance model?
The disease avoidance model identifies psychological processes that evolved to protect against the threat of interpersonal transmission of disease. The model is believed to have evolved to be biased towards false positives. For example, early humans would have been more likely to judge a healthy person as sick than to judge a sick person as healthy. The reason was that falsely judging someone as sick posed a much lower risk to survival than falsely judging someone as healthy. The bias towards false positives was adopted in an effort to curb the spread of disease. In today’s world, these adaptations are no longer much needed, leading to a false association of disability with disease. That is, people with disabilities may be stigmatized and avoided for fear of catching a disease. For example, non-disabled people may feel uncomfortable and shorten or completely avoid interactions with disabled people.
Automatic and controlled thoughts
The disease avoidance model is based on automatic thoughts, which we react to quickly without being aware of them, as opposed to controlled thoughts, which are a slower process that requires conscious attention. These two types of thinking map onto implicit and explicit bias, respectively. A recent post on this blog explains how these two ways of thinking are illustrated by the biscuit tin opening meme. Automatic thoughts function to protect us from threats in situations that require rapid action, and originate from evolutionarily older parts of the brain shared with other animals. Automatic thoughts are not sophisticated enough to distinguish between two very different things: disability and contagion. Today, when automatic thoughts no longer serve a survival purpose, they can limit us from having meaningful connections with other people, in this case people with disabilities. Implicit bias is harder to change because it happens outside of our awareness.
The prevalence of the disorder
Disability prevalence is an example of implicit bias, the belief that a disability affects more areas than it actually does. For example, people with facial differences may be mistakenly believed to also have intellectual disabilities because of their appearance. Related to the illness-avoidance model, people with facial scars may be avoided due to the belief that they are dangerous. Again, false negatives are less dangerous than false positives.
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One of the most startling examples of the pervasiveness of disability is that of Oscar-winning deaf actress Marlee Maitland. Once while on a plane, a flight attendant noticed her signing to the person next to her. Thinking she was being proactive, she brought over a menu in Braille. Maitland was perplexed and said, “I’m just deaf, I’m not blind.”
The naturalistic fallacy
Stereotypes persist even when the statistical reality on which they were based has changed and is no longer true. When people learn that these long-held beliefs are deep-rooted, they can fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy, which is the belief that if something is natural, it is good. When we learn that the disease-avoidance model comes from evolutionary adaptation, it is easy to justify our biases or feel hopeless about changing them. Even if these biases are deep-rooted, that does not mean that we cannot or should not change them. For example, many behaviors that were adaptive for early humans, such as using plumbing and cooking, have been modified in modern civilizations. These innovations benefit modern society by keeping us safer. We may not have been born to do those things, but we have collectively decided as a society to value them. Similarly, we can have a modern civilization that safely and fairly includes people with disabilities.
Overcoming Implicit Bias
The good news is that you can overcome implicit bias with controlled thinking. The next time you interact with someone with a disability, take a moment afterwards to examine your own behavior and notice if it displays bias. Then, you can consciously correct that bias by changing your behavior. This process will become easier and more automatic over time, eventually forming a new habit. Finally, you can act as an ally by openly discussing ableism with your friends, both with and without disabilities.
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Sydney Robertson is a psychology major in the Honors College at Oregon State University and a graduate of Dr. Bogart’s Disability Psychology class.
References
Park, JH, Faulkner, J. & Schaller, M. Evolved illness avoidance processes and contemporary antisocial behavior: Prejudicial attitudes and avoidance of people with physical disabilities. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 27, 65–87 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023910408854