article critique

RESULTS

Public Perceptions of People with Disabilities

Yasmeen Gonzales, Elissa Duren, Georgia Magee, Rachel Stagner, & Dr. Scott Frankowski

INTRODUCTION

Background: Behaving morally at times allows a person to subsequently behave immorally – this is called moral licensing.1,2

Purpose: The purpose of the research is to investigate whether moral licensing can be a contributing factor to workplace disparities among people with disabilities.

Hypothesis: We hypothesized that if

people are led to believe they have more positive

attitudes toward people with disabilities,

they may feel they have a moral license to

have more discriminatory attitudes toward

disability in the workplace.

METHODOLOGY

Participants:

110 participants

Ages 18 and up

Procedure:

First

Questions regarding interpersonal interactions with people with disabilities.3

E.g. Do you personally tend to think of disabled people with discomfort?

Next: Experimental manipulation

Last

Questions regarding interactions with people with disabilities in the workplace. 4

E.g. Thinking about disabled people in general, could an individual with a disability increase a person’s workload?

Experimental manipulation: Randomly assigned to one of two conditions:

Moral licensing condition – After completing attitudes toward disability questionnaire, saw message that stated, “Based on your responses, you scored 15% higher on this measure than the average person who took this survey.”

Control condition – No information given after attitudes toward disability questionnaire

DISCUSSION

Hypothesis not supported – No evidence for that people feel they have a moral license for work-related discrimination if they are led to believe their attitudes toward disability are more positive than average

Did not test whether people actually believed the false feedback, however.

In previous research that we carried out5, we found that people who had more positive attitudes toward disability also held caring for others as a moral virtue. Thus, it makes sense people would not be easily swayed in the attitudes on topic that’s morally relevant

REFERENCES

Analysis:

Independent samples t-test

The condition as the independent variable

attitudes toward disability as the dependent measure

The results indicated there were no differences in attitudes toward disability in the workplace between the moral licensing and control conditions.

Moral Licensing and control conditions strongly correlated, indicating that people who have more positive attitudes toward interpersonal disability also have more positive attitudes toward disability in the workplace.

Kouchaki, M. (2011). Vicarious moral licensing: The influence of others past moral actions on moral behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 702–715. doi: 10.1037/a0024552

Merritt, A. C., Effron, D. A., & Monin, B. (2010, May 5). Moral Self‐Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00263.x

Staniland, L. (2011). Public Perceptions of Disabled People: Evidence from the British Social Attitudes Survey 2009.

Copeland, J., Chan, F., Bezyak, J., & Fraser, R. T. (2010). Assessing cognitive and affective reactions of employers toward people with disabilities in the workplace. Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, 20(4), 427-434.

Duren, E., Gonzales, Y., Nelson, J., *Onyekere, C., Roberts, T. & Frankowski, S.D. (November, 2019). Public Perception of People Living With Disabilities. MSU-Texas Celebration of Scholarship. Wichita Falls, TX.