Explicit and Implicit Disability Attitudes of Social Service Professionals

Posted on March 12, 2026

By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research

Experiencing discrimination from service providers negatively impacts disabled people’s outcomes. That’s one key reason why it’s important to know more about social service professionals’ biases, especially the ones they don’t realize they have – implicit attitudes. In this study, Dr. Aleksa Owen (University of Nevada Reno) and I explored social service professionals’ explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) attitudes about disability. To do so, we analyzed Disability Attitudes Implicit Association Test (DA-IAT) data from 5,167 social service professionals, including social workers and counselors.

The majority (70%) of social service professionals self-reported (explicit attitudes) that they had no biases – that they preferred disabled and nondisabled people equally. However, when we looked at their unconscious implicit attitudes, the overwhelming majority (78%) were biased, preferring nondisabled people over disabled people. In fact, 40% strongly preferred nondisabled people over disabled people implicitly.

Explicit and Implicit Attitudes of Social Service Professionals

In addition, when we looked at the relationship between social service professionals explicit and implicit attitudes, we found that most social service professionals did not know the true extent of their implicit attitudes. For example, of the social service professionals that said they preferred disabled people explicitly, only 24% actually did implicitly; instead, 60% actually preferred nondisabled people implicitly, and 15% had no implicit preference.

There were also several differences in social service professionals’ implicit attitudes based on their sociodemographics. Social service professionals that were younger, cisgender women, gender minorities, disabled, had disabled close friends or family, and were strongly liberal had less implicit bias.

“While parallel with other populations, these findings are nonetheless problematic as this combination of explicit and implicit attitudes means social service professionals are not only often not consciously aware of the extent of their biases, but also that their biases may “leak out” in ways they do not recognize or realize. Social service professionals may make decisions informed by their implicit bias… social workers should reflect on their personal biases and how those may reflect and reinforce structural ableism” (Owen & Friedman, 2026).

This article is a summary of the following journal manuscript: Owen, A., & Friedman, C. (2026). Hidden bias: Social service professionals’ attitudes towards physical disability. Social Work. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/swag006