How does children's understanding of disabilities influence their choice of playmates?

Abstract

Prejudiced attitudes toward people with disabilities (PWD) is a major social problem. How does this prejudice first take shape? In the present study we investigated children's attitudes towards PWD (people with disabilities) and how this varies with children's age and the type of disability. We hypothesized that children would show prejudice toward PWD overall, that children's prejudice toward PWD would increase with age, and their prejudices would be stronger toward more-impairing than less-impairing disabilities. We also explored whether children's prejudices would vary based on their essentialist concepts of disability as inborn, and whether parents had accurate ideas about their children's prejudices toward PWD. Six- to nine-year-old child participants (n=61) completed a playmate preference task in which they chose between a disabled or non-disabled playmate (8 trials). Their essentialist concepts of disability were also assessed, and their parents provided demographic information and predictions about their children's prejudices. Results showed that children did prefer nondisabled over disabled playmates, confirming our first hypothesis. We also found that children were most prejudiced towards highly impairing disabilities, confirming our second hypothesis. However, our results did not indicate any age differences in general disability prejudice, in contrast to our third hypothesis. However, there was a marginally significant interaction between age and children's conceptions of disability which predicted children's prejudice scores. In particular, for young children, thinking about disabilities as something inborn made them less prejudiced, but for older children, the opposite was true. Overall, this study shows that prejudice toward PWD starts early in development, and that different forms of reasoning about disabilities can either mitigate or reinforce disability prejudice due to the placement of blame for disability as something either extrinsic or intrinsic to the person.