Stumbling in Their Shoes

Abstract

Simulating other people’s difficulties often improves attitudes toward those people. In the case of physical disabilities, however, such experience simulations can backfire. By highlighting the initial challenges of becoming disabled, experience simulations decrease the perceived adaptability of being disabled and reduce the judged capabilities of disabled people. In two experiments, participants engaged in a challenging blindness simulation and afterward judged blind people as less capable of work and independent living than did participants after simulating a different impairment (Experiment 1), no impairment (Experiments 1 and 2), or after merely watching someone else simulate blindness (Experiment 2). Blindness simulators forecast that they would be less capable themselves if blind and that they would adapt to blindness more slowly (Experiment 2), highlighting the self-centered nature of judged capabilities of disabled people. The findings demonstrate that experience simulation can sometimes harm rather than help attitudes toward other people’s difficulties.