One of our fundamental brain functions for navigating in this complex world is to categorise information. We also do this with people, which means that we usually don’t perceive them through their unique, personal identity, but rather through their social identity. We categorise them into distinct social groups, based on, for example, physical traits (e.g. disabled, non-disabled, young, old), social roles (e.g. mother, father, movie stars), institutional affiliations (e.g. catholic priests), interests (e.g. gamers, bikers), professions (e.g. accountant) and political ideology (e.g. conservative, liberal).

When we categorise others, we see them as an ‘outgroup’ that is different to our own ‘ingroup’. The way we describe the outgroup is through stereotypes. This usually leads to negative attitudes towards outgroups. Basically, we exclude them from the ingroup and want to maintain a clear social boundary and distance from them.

Of course, we mostly see people in intersecting categories. For instance, when I think about my mother, I also think of her as female and older than me. Social categorisation enables us to understand and navigate in the world around us. It is an essential cognitive mechanism that we use on a daily basis to efficiently deal with people and with ourselves. It helps us evaluate our past, steer through our present and plan our future.

But, despite its usefulness, social categorisation has a major disadvantage: It can lead to social, cultural, political or economic power imbalances through the stigmatisation of particular outgroups, such as disabled people.

Ingroup members are the ones who stereotype and hold the stereotypes, and outgroup members are the stereotyped ones. The above image shows some ingroup-outgroup examples.

Although we have first-hand experience with some outgroups, we usually know and evaluate most outgroups through media representations. For instance, before I made documentaries featuring blind characters, I only knew about blind people through fiction films and documentaries. My knowledge and attitude towards blind people was entirely shaped by media.

Social categorisation depends not only on how another person behaves or what they look like, but also on the context and situation. This is important for media making, because media content, even factual media, constructs characters through narrative and aesthetic means. Thus, when film directors or documentary makers create media content that features disabled people, they have a lot of control on how much the disability is emphasised or de-emphasised. They also control which additional social identities and associated traits and behaviours, are shown or not shown. This determines whether their representations contribute to prolonging or reducing disability stigma.

For more information about social identity and social categorisation, see Chapter 2.

The next section explains how stereotypes are formed and how they are attached to outgroups.