Counter-Stereotypical Stories: A Strategy for Overcoming Disability Stereotypes?

Portrayals of disability are almost entirely absent in media, and those few that do existrenearly always heavily stereotyped. Through repeated exposure, the stereotypes become largely automatic overtime and lead to formation of implicit and explicit disability attitudes. The study engaged college students (16 Males & 16 Females) in a lexical decision task (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971, 1976) which yields a measure of associative strength between two words (e.g., Impairment: Lazy; Impairment: Efficient). The study aimed to investigate whether counterstereotypical disability associations are activated as an effect of priming task (presentation of a counterstereotypical story). The experimental group was presented with the counter-stereotypical story (priming task) and the lexical decision task and the word recognition. The control group only completed the lexical decision task and word recognition (The priming task was absent for the control condition). The lexical task was presented using Inquisit 5 software (2016) and the response times for category associates (counter-stereotypical associates, e.g., Impairment: Efficient) and neutral associates (e.g., Impairment: Circle) were stored. Mann-Whitney-U-Test was used to test the hypotheses, for which SPSS was used. No significant difference was found between the mean response time of category words associates versus neutral words associates for experimental group, and the mean response time of category words associates for the experimental and control group. Further, there was no significant difference in the mean frequencies of neutral and category words recognized in experimental groups, and the mean frequencies of category words recognized in experimental versus control group.