Why People Act Like Disability Is Contagious

Six disabled people of color on a rooftop deck.

Source: Disabled and Here / Creative Commons License

Co-authored by Kathleen R. Bogart, Ph.D. and Sydney Robertson

Imagine that you are interviewing for a job. You're nervous and not sure how you will compare to the other interviewees, but you know you are qualified. During the interview, you notice that the interviewer is cutting you off and asking short “yes or no” questions, before letting you go after less than 10 minutes. You start to wonder, “is it because of my disability?” This is an experience that some members of the disabled community have faced. People with disabilities face many forms of stigma and discrimination, but some of these behaviors can be specifically attributed to the disease-avoidance model.

What Is the Disease-Avoidance Model?

The disease avoidance model identifies psychological processes that evolved to protect against the threat of interpersonal transmission of illnesses. This model is thought 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, rather than a sick person as healthy. The reason for this was because falsely judging someone to be sick was much less risky to one’s survival than falsely judging someone to be healthy. In an effort to control the spread of illness, biases towards false positives were adopted. In today’s world, these adaptations are largely no longer needed, leading to the false association of disability with disease. This means that people with disabilities may be stigmatized and avoided for fear of contracting an illness. For example, people without disabilities may feel uncomfortable and try to shorten or avoid interactions with them altogether.

Automatic Versus Controlled Thinking

The disease-avoidance model is based on automatic thinking which consists of quick responses without awareness, as opposed to controlled thinking, a slower process, requiring conscious attention. These two types of thinking map onto implicit and explicit bias, respectively. A recent post on this blog describes how a meme about opening a can of biscuits illustrates these two ways of thinking. Functioning to protect us from threats in situations where quick action is needed, automatic thinking originates in evolutionarily old parts of the brain shared with other animals. Automatic thinking is not refined enough to make distinctions between disability and contagion, which are two very different things. Today, in cases where automatic thinking no longer serves a survival purpose, it can limit us from having meaningful connections with others, in this case, people with disabilities. Implicit biases are challenging to change because they happen outside our awareness.

Disability Spread

Disability spread, one example of implicit bias, is the belief that a disability affects more domains than it actually does. For example, people with facial differences may be mistaken to also have an intellectual disability because of how they look. In relation to the disease-avoidance model, someone who has scars on their face may be avoided because of beliefs that they are dangerous. Again, false-negatives are less dangerous than false positives.

One of the wildest examples of disability spread comes from Marlee Matland, the Oscar-winning deaf actress. Once, while on a plane, a flight attendant noticed her signing to a seatmate. Thinking she was being proactive, she brought her a braille menu. This left Maitland puzzled, "I'm deaf, not blind!"

The Naturalistic Fallacy

Stereotypes persist even when the statistical realities they were based on shift and are no longer true. When people learn that these long-held beliefs may be hard-wired, they may fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy. This is a belief that if something is natural then it's good. Upon learning that the disease-avoidance model comes from evolutionary adaptations, it is easy to justify one’s biases or feel hopeless in changing them. Even if these biases are ingrained, this doesn’t mean that they can’t and shouldn’t be changed. For example, there are many behaviors that were adaptive for early humans that we have now changed in modern civilization, including things like using plumbing and cooking food. These innovations benefit our modern society by keeping us safer. While we may not be born to do those things, we have collectively as a society decided that we value them. Similarly, we can have a modern civilization that safely and equitably includes disabled people.

Overriding Implicit Bias

The good news is that you can override implicit bias with controlled thinking. Next time you interact with someone with a disability, take some time to examine your behavior afterward and note if it showed bias. Next, you can correct that bias by consciously changing your behavior. This process gets easier and more automatic over time, until eventually you have created a new habit. Finally, you can act as an ally by having open discussions about ableism with friends with and without disabilities.

Sydney Robertson is a Psychology major in the Honors College at Oregon State University and an alum of Dr. Bogart’s Psychology of Disability class.