Functional Mind

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People who have physical disabilities or who have difficulty moving easily often experience discrimination in everyday life. This project focuses on the dehumanizing treatment of such people. The research examines how it is that we make judgments about others' worth based on their bodies or on their physical mobility. It also considers why it is that we sometimes see those lacking physical abilities as also lacking mental abilities. The long-term goal is to find ways to reduce the dehumanization of people who have mobility challenges. A new model of dehumanization proposes that we often fail to carefully consider others' minds, especially when those others do not appear able to influence our own lives. According to this model, people who lack physical mobility (such as the elderly, obese individuals, physically disabled persons) often fail to claim our attention. By failing to think about them, we then fail to consider their minds as being sophisticated and capable. A deeper understanding of this process will support the development of interventions aimed at reducing the discrimination so often experienced by those who have physical disabilities.Sixteen behavioral experiments examine the link between how others are perceived and the triggering of dehumanizing responses. It is expected that perceiving others as personally relevant will trigger the perception of more sophisticated minds, and that believing a target is not personally relevant will trigger dehumanizing responses. The first line of work will establish that simple cues to self-relevance (such as an impending interaction or direct eye gaze) will trigger the perception that others' have more sophisticated minds. The second and third lines of work will extend these findings to physical mobility cues, demonstrating that individuals who have lesser physical mobility will be seen as less capable of acting on the self, and therefore will be ascribed less sophisticated physical capacities. This project will also extend to interventions to reduce the dehumanization of those with physical disabilities. It is expected that individuals who are seen as more physically capable (because of effective prostheses) will no longer be dehumanized. Taken together, this research bridges the interface between person perception, the perception of others' bodies, and mind perception. It also addresses questions about the causes of dehumanizing stigma and how such stigma may be reduced.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.