lth: health status, environment, and personal factors. In the ICF’s model, these factors are considered dimensions and not determinants of disability, as ‘pathology’ in the individual model [7, 8] or ‘environmental factors’ in the social one .
Until the last century, disability research was conducted predominantly—though not exclusively (e.g. rehabilitation theory, epidemiology, and health and social policy)—within a sociological perspective (see the British approach to disability studies: [2, 24–26]) consistent with the dominant paradigm in the social sciences known as the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM; [27, 28]) or social constructionism . The SSSM argues that procedural or algorithmic features, without content, are innate, while mental organization and categorization are heavily influenced by culture . The human mind is little more than a blank slate [28, 30–32] that incorporates a capacity for culture shaped and transformed by social factors . The SSSM influences disability studies such that disability (with its core concepts of diversity and difference) is regarded as a cultural construction process neglecting any element related to the innate cognitive architecture of humans .
The present research tested whether beliefs about disability models are transmitted culturally. Whether or not the disability models are exclusively a cultural product, they are only the outcome of a learning process. We surveyed the extent of the cultural transmission of the three disability models (individual, social, and biopsychosocial) by comparing the disability-related descriptions and beliefs of parents and their children. Accordingly, the disability models were considered as dependent variables potentially being affected by the child milieu (family value and education). To the extent that the child-related individual differences in disability models were not totally attributable to the child milieu, we hypothesized that children are not completely permeable to social representations of disability because of cognitive constraints.
A modified version of Evans’s  experimental paradigm, originally used to survey the emergence of beliefs about the origin of species in children, was used to test these beliefs. Comparing parent and child beliefs and disability descriptions helped to investigate the extent of cultural transmission of the three disability models (individual, social, and biopsychosocial).
In the early 2000s, Evans [35–37] investigated the emergence and spread of beliefs regarding the origin of species in both fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist Christian school communities. Using a mixed qualitative–quantitative design, Evans compared the beliefs of children and parents about the origin of species to evaluate if the spread of creationist and evolutionist beliefs in the general population was indicative of cognitive constraints or was simply a function of social forces .
Creationism and evolutionism have historically and culturally been viewed as contrasting and polarizing. The same holds true with disability models, which are contrasting perspectives on human beings and the social world. These models have influenced the education of children from the time children enter primary school. While the individual model, much like creationism, seems intuitively plausible [4, 25, 38, 39], the social model, developed as a reversal of the individual model, is as counterintuitive as evolution [25, 40–43].
A total of 76 primary school aged children and their parents (N = 152) participated in this study (S1 File–Dataset). Of this, 46.1% of the children were male (N = 35) and 53.9% were female (N = 41), with a mean age of 8.46 (M = 8.40; F = 8.51; SD (M/F) = 1.46). In addition, 28.9% of the parents were male (N = 22) and 71.1% were female (N = 54), with a mean age of 42.01 (M = 43.23; F = 41.52; SD (M/F) = 5.21). One child and his parent’s data were eliminated because of parent’s illegible writing. All of the children in the sample attended state school. The Institutional Review Board of the Department of Philosophy, Social & Human S