ia the Implicit Association Test . In contrast to the individual model, the use of the social model significantly increases from the youngest to the older. In other words, the younger the respondent is, the greater the preference for the individual model. This prompts us to believe that the strong polarization between individual and social model [5, 15–17] is a cultural construct rather than a cognitive constraint: One births “individual” and dies “social.” The ontogenetic evolution of the social model seems to mirror the historical development of the disability models; whereas the individual model crosses throughout the human history with its several faces (religious, ethic, aesthetic, medical, biological) [20–22, 46], the social model developed recently in Britain in opposition to the individual one [18, 25]. By adopting a social perspective on disability (social model) as they age, people provide a more complex explanation of disability, although not at the complexity level of the biopsychosocial model , which is not preferred by any age group.
Disability Explanation—Closed-Ended Questionnaire
Considering the closed-ended questionnaire, preference for the social model increases with age whereas preference for the individual model decreases with age (Fig 2). The most striking difference when comparing the open- and closed-ended questionnaires is that the mean agreement for the social (and biopsychosocial) model is significantly higher than for the individual model for all age groups. What happened in the shift from the open- to closed-ended questions, administered to the same respondents in a span of a few minutes from each other? We think that people used two cognitive processes elicited by different contexts hinged on two distinct testing procedures. In the open-ended questions, the task was to provide a personal opinion on why a man in a wheelchair (or a blind woman, or an autistic child, or an able-bodied woman) has difficulties in life. In this case, respondents recall from memory and process a veridical explanation, as consistent as possible, by relying on their most immediately available mental lexicon. In this way, the respondent, not trained in disability study and models, is more subjected to an automatic cognitive process [47, 48]. As found in our previous experiment , on an implicit level, people strongly and stereotypically associate disability with concepts that characterize the individual model rather than the social one. In contrast, in answering the closed-ended questions, the respondent has the opportunity to evaluate statements built to represent all the main theoretical features of the disability models. Respondents were asked to rate statements often mutually contradictory and sometimes politically incorrect and not socially acceptable. In this case, they tended to provide more socially desirable answers .
The most socially acceptable statements in Italian culture are, without doubt, wording that reflects the social model of disability rather the individual model [4, 39]. The Italian legislature has promoted social inclusion of people with disability (Law 517/77) for more than 40 years; meanwhile, twenty-two years of integration of students with disabilities at all school levels (Law 104/92)  have widespread a social model of disability. Maybe for these reasons, even the children found the statements reflecting the social model (e.g., “[Giovanni has difficult in life because] he encounters lots of obstacles”) more agreeable than those related to the individual model (e.g., “[Giovanni has difficult in life because] he’s ugly”) (S2 File Details of Measures). This suggests that even if the attractiveness of the individual model remains persistent, it is possible that other disability representations accompany and overlap it. Briefly, the representation of disability is, to some extent, improved upon education.
Notwithstanding the striking emergence of the social model in the closed-ended questionnaires, though, the endorsement of all age groups did not reach a properly positive level. In fact, the hig