Study: Bias Against People with Disabilities Isn't Decreasing
New research out of Harvard says biases against people
with disabilities are not substantially fading or changing,
even as biases against other groups of people are.
Researchers Tessa E.S. Charlesworth and Mahzarin
R. Banaji, both from Harvard University, published their
study in American Psychologist.
Charlesworth and Banaji say that while biases about
sexual orientation and race have been decreasing,
the bias towards people with disability hasn’t changed
much over the last decade and a half.
A report on the research from Harvard Gazette said,
“Those hidden prejudices [against people with disabilities]
have hardly changed over a 14-year period and
could take more than 200 years to reach neutrality, or
zero bias.”
The Gazette quotes Charlesworth, who is doing
post-doctoral research with Harvard’s department of
psychology: “Implicit bias can change. But so far, it’s only
changed for some groups. It changed for sexuality and
race bias pretty dramatically. Sexuality biases dropped
64 percent over 14 years. … Disability bias over 14 years
has only shifted by 3 percent. The disparity between the
change in sexuality bias and the stability in disability bias
is massive.”
Charlesworth told The Gazette that explicit biases
about people with disabilities have dropped by 37
percent. But implicit biases — Charlesworth describes
those as “more automatic and less controlled” than
explicit beliefs — can be much harder to move. In a
June 2021 Harvard Horizons talk called, “Can Implicit
Bias Change?”, Charlesworth said implicit bias against
people with disabilities hasn’t improved at all in the last
10 years.
In that talk, Charlesworth explained that major shifts
in biases across large swaths of society often happen in
response to significant “social movements, such as Black
Lives Matter or #MeToo, federal legislation of same-sex
marriage or mainstream media representation. My new
research is telling us that these are the kinds of social
events that are prompting transformation not only in our
explicit, conscious values, but also in implicit bias. We
know now that even implicit bias can change.”
The research published in American Psychologist is
titled, “Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes II.”