As a social psychologist at a liberal-arts college, I try to help students recognize, and perhaps overcome, stereotyped expectations about diverse social groups. About 20 years ago, after working on a study of how amputees adjusted to their condition, I became interested in how people with disabilities — let’s call them insiders — are sometimes judged by outsiders, or nondisabled people. (Some rehabilitation professionals use those terms to emphasize that those two categories are socially constructed. Specifically, I wondered whether, and how, outsiders could come to better understand insiders’ actual experiences. A few years ago I had an opportunity to carry out some experiments aimed at helping people broaden their perspectives.
