In the past decades, there is an increasing trend of including people with a disability into society. For example, the spread of low-floor busses to improve mobility of people with a disability (Larvey, Davey, Woodside, & Ewart, 1996) or the rising trend of including children with special educational needs (SEN) into regular schools (Meijer, 2003). Despite this trend towards inclusion, multiple studies have shown that inclusion does not necessarily lead to more social contacts or even friendships between people without and people with a disability (e.g., Bossaert, Colpin, Pijl, & Petry, 2012). It is often assumed that full inclusion of people with a disability is hindered by the existence of negative attitudes towards them by people who have no disability (Antonak & Lineveh, 2000). In the literature, there is an abundance of descriptive studies on explicit attitudes as well as of studies on how we can train explicit attitudes. In contrast, in recent years only a limited number of studies has looked at implicit attitudes and how implicit attitudes towards people with a disability can be changed. However, Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann and Banaji (2009) found that for socially sensible topics explicit attitudes were an impaired predictor for behavior. The predictive validity of implicit attitudes, however, was much less affected by the social sensibility of a topic. In our two present studies we argue that attitudes towards people with a disability are a socially sensitive topic, and thus, only looking at explicit attitudes will be less effective in predicting behavior towards people with a disability.

Because of the more extensive documentation on the effect of explicit attitudes on behavior towards people with a disability our main aims are: 1) to see what implicit attitudes people have towards people with a disability and 2) to know if we would be able to change participants implicit attitudes towards people with a disability using an adapted version of the Approach Avoidance Task (AAT).

During an AAT participants are presented with pictures and they have to move a manikin towards (approach) or away from (avoid) the picture. The core idea underlying the AAT is that attitude objects can automatically trigger a motivational orientation and congruent behavioural schema of approach and avoidance (Strack & Deutsch, 2004). Previous research, in varying research fields, has shown that a desired response can be trained using the AAT. Consequently, we could hypothesize that the AAT can also be used to change attitudes towards people with a disability.

In this presentation, we will elaborate on how our two studies try to fill these gaps in the literature. In our first study, among first year secondary school students, the main research questions are 1) if students have more positive or more negative implicit attitudes towards their peers with SEN and 2) if the AAT has a positive effect on the implicit attitudes of typically developing students towards students with SEN. And if so, if this effect lasts over time. Our second study tries to answer the questions 1) if people have more positive or more negative implicit attitudes towards people with a disability and 2) if there is an effect of an AAT training on the implicit attitudes of people without a disability towards people with a disability.

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