Humans have a strong impulse to help others because of biological, social, and cultural factors.

This impulse can misfire when sighted people use mental shortcuts to decide how to help blind people.

To offer more appropriate help, sighted people need to listen to the expert testimony of blind people.

Many years ago, I was playing with my niece, who was only one year old at the time. She was happy and excited. In her enthusiasm, she threw an object that opened a small cut on my forehead. She immediately cried out in despair, “My friend is hurt!” She wanted someone to help me.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that humans are born to help. In fact, helping behavior in humans evolved from the psychological processes that motivated mutual cooperation in ancestral hominids (Buss, 2016; Hepach et al., 2020).

The evolutionary origins of cooperative helping gave rise to social and cultural practices, norms, values, etc., that govern cooperative helping in humans today. The combined influence of biological, social, and cultural factors underlie the strong impulse to help that most of us experience when we see someone in need.

But this impulse can misfire, as it sometimes does in situations where nondisabled people try to help people with disabling impairments, such as blindness. Sighted people often feel confident that their vision provides more reliable knowledge about their surroundings than blind people get from their nonvisual senses. Blind people, on the other hand, claim that their training gives them the cognitive skills needed to gain reliable knowledge about their surroundings. The result is miscommunication and, often, highly stressful interactions, especially for blind people who frequently deal with these situations.

This post explores reasons for help-related miscommunication between sighted and blind people. My goal is to encourage sighted people, who obviously are concerned with the well-being of others, to offer more effective help to people who are blind.

The Development of Instrumental Helping

Instrumental help occurs frequently in blind-sighted interactions. “Instrumental help” is the provision of concrete, practical, direct assistance to another who is trying to achieve a goal (Brownelle et al., 2013; Svetlova et al., 2010).

As we saw with my niece, instrumental helping develops early in life. By about 18 months of age, children often try to help people without being asked or promised a reward (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). For example, toddlers will help others to get past physical obstacles or locate a dropped object.

At around three years of age, children realize that sometimes the best way to help is to do something other than what someone requests. Alia Martin & Kristina Olson (2013) called this type of instrumental help “paternalistic helping.” They defined paternalistic help as: the substitution of a more effective method of help for an ineffective method, as judged by the child. For example, young children will substitute an undamaged tool for a requested tool that is damaged.

Instrumental Helping of Blind People

Sighted onlookers often feel concerned about someone using a white cane to cross a busy intersection. They may offer paternalistic help, sometimes by running up to the person, grabbing their arm, and attempting to pull them to the other side. The blind person often claims that they are able to cross streets safely. But sighted people usually find that claim to be implausible.

The central question is, why do sighted people immediately dismiss that claim? One reason is that the lived experience of sighted people convinces them that vision is necessary for functioning in everyday life: They rely on vision more than any other sense. A second reason is the influence of cognitive structures called “epistemic schemas.”

An epistemic schema is a set of implicit (unconscious) assumptions and mental habits that actively focus our attention on certain kinds of information, while filtering out other kinds of information (Peña-Guzmán & Reynolds, 2019). Thus, without our being aware of it, epistemic schemas set limits on what people consider to be valid knowledge and who they consider to be reliable knowers.

Ableism is an epistemic schema that guides the help-related actions of sighted people (Peña-Guzmán & Reynolds, 2019). "Ableism" is a mostly implicit cultural ideology about the differences between disabled and nondisabled people. Some of the assumptions reflect negative cultural stereotypes about disability. These stereotypes include traits such as incompetence, dependence, helplessness, asexuality, and low intelligence (Nario-Redmond, 2010; Nario-Redmond, 2020).

Ableist assumptions often lead well-meaning people, without realizing it, to treat disabled people in ways that devalue or dehumanize them (Campbell, 2009; Hehir, 2002). For example, under certain circumstances, ableism motivates nondisabled people to help even when disabled people insist that their help is unneeded. Such paternalistic help occurs when helpers feel they need to act quickly or are not motivated to think carefully about the situation (see Devine, 1989 for a general discussion of implicit processing). In those circumstances, their decision-making is guided by fast-acting mental shortcuts (heuristics) that implicitly assume the following:

Disabled and nondisabled bodies experience the world in different ways

These different experiences produce differences in knowledge

The knowledge gained from nondisabled bodies is more accurate than the knowledge gained from disabled bodies

In other words, the ableist schema leads people to infer that nondisabled “ways of knowing” produce knowledge that is more valid, reliable, and objective than disabled ways of knowing. This inference allows nondisabled people to, first, disregard disabled people’s claims about their abilities and, second, conclude that they know best how to help the disabled person (Klyve, 2019; also see Fricker, 2003).

How Can Sighted People Help More Effectively?

Sighted people who frequently interact with people who are blind can learn to bypass the rapid-acting mental shortcuts triggered by the ableist schema. The key is to give themselves time to think carefully about what is happening during help-related situations. For example, sighted people can mentally rehearse how they would respond more appropriately if they see a blind person crossing a street.

I would like to thank Kiera Feng for her editorial assistance.

Devine, P.G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(1), 5-18. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.56.1.5

Brownell, C. A., Svetlova, M., Anderson, R., Nichols, S. R., & Drummond, J. (2013). Socialization of early prosocial behavior: Parents’ talk about emotions is associated with sharing and helping in toddlers. Infancy, 18(1), 91–119. doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7078.2012.00125.x

Buss, D. M. (2016). Evolutionary theories in psychology. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds.), Noba textbook series: Psychology. DEF Publishers. nobaproject.com/modules/evolutionary-theories-in-psychology

Campbell, F. K. (2009). Contours of ableism: The production of disability and abledness. Palgrave Macmillan.

Hehir, T. (2002). Eliminating ableism in education. Harvard Educational Review, 72(1), 1–33. doi.org/10.17763/haer.72.1.03866528702g2105

Hepach, R., Benziad, L., & Tomasello, M. (2020). Chimpanzees help others with what they want; children help them with what they need. Developmental Science, 23(3), e12922. doi.org/10.1111/desc.12922

Klyve, G. P. (2019). Whose knowledge? Epistemic injustice and challenges in attending to children’s voices. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 19(3). doi.org/10.15845/voices.v19i3.2834

Martin, A., & Olson, K. R. (2013). When kids know better: Paternalistic helping in 3-year-old children. Developmental Psychology, 49(11), 2071–2081. doi.org/10.1037/a0031715

Nario‐Redmond, M.R. (2010). Cultural stereotypes of disabled and non-disabled men and women: Consensus for global category representations and diagnostic domains. British Journal of Social Psychology, 49(3), 471-488. doi.org/10.1348/014466609X468411

Nario-Redmond, M. R. (2020). Cultural and impairment-specific stereotypes (Chap. 4). In Ableism: The causes and consequences of disability prejudice (pp. 124-165). John Wiley & Sons. doi.org/10.1002/9781119142140.ch4

Peña-Guzmán, D. M., & Reynolds, J. M. (2019). The harm of ableism: Medical error and epistemic injustice. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 29(3), 205–242. doi.org/10.1353/ken.2019.0023

Schultz, B. E., Corbett, C. F., & Hughes, R. G. (2022). Instrumental support: A conceptual analysis. Nursing Forum, 57(4), 665–670. doi.org/10.1111/nuf.12704

Svetlova, M., Nichols, S. R., & Brownell, C. A. (2010). Toddlers’ prosocial behavior: From instrumental to empathic to altruistic helping. Child Development, 81(6), 1814–1827. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01512.x

Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Science, 311(5765), 1301–1303. doi.org/10.1126/science.1121448

© Psychology Today