Do Children Learn Representations, Stigmas, and Stereotypes About Disability or Do They Create Them to Some Extent?

Attitudes towards disability result from the tendency of human beings to create representations from experience. Models of disability are categorical representations that organize experience and help people to identify and explain the social reaction to human, biological, and social diversity, which can be the result of both cultural learning processes and the outcome of evolved psychological mechanisms. This chapter reports two research studies conducted by Federici and colleagues which were designed to verify whether the wide range of attitudes toward people with disabilities and disability models are attributable not only to contextual variables but also to universal psychological mechanisms. These studies were carried out to shed light on the following research questions: (i) What understanding of the causal origin of disability do young children have? (ii) Does parental education create and shape the disability representations of their children? (iii) Is the Piagetian assumption that young children conceptualize disability with difficulty evidence-based? In the first mixed-method research study, four questionnaires were administered to a sample of 76 primary school aged children, and one of their parents (n = 152). Questionnaires included both open-ended and closed-ended questions. The open-ended questions were created to collect uncensored personal explanations of disability, whereas the closed questions were designed to elicit a response about agreement to statements built on the three most widespread disability models: medical/individual, social, and biopsychosocial. Quantitative and qualitative analysis showed that people with disabilities are thought of as being sick by the youngest children in the study (6–8 years old). This early disability representation of children is consistent with the medical/individual model of disability and independent of disability explanations and representations by parents. As children grow older (9–11 years old), knowledge regarding disability increases and stereotypical beliefs about disability decrease, as they tend to espouse their parents’ representations. In the second qualitative research study, children’s cognitive and affective components were assessed through the Affect in Play Scale, where they play with two puppets and one of these was placed in a wheelchair toy. Sixty-three children aged 6–10 years participated in the study. The results showed that when children are involved in pretend play in which concepts of disability emerge, these concepts are almost exclusively related to the medical/individual model of disability. These two studies suggest that: (i) the origin of perceptions, stigmas, and stereotypes about disability and diversity could be traced back to evolved psychological mechanisms and not just to cultural models; (ii) there are implications for intervention with children in educational contexts that aim to teach children about disability.