How disability and assistive technologies knowledge might shape transhumanist orientations: a pilot study among Romanian adults.
Alexandra Cobzeanu, Bogdan Mihail Cobzeanu, Oana Roxana Bitere-Popa and 1 others
Disability knowledge was associated with assistive-technology knowledge, which was in turn associated with stronger belief in human enhancement.
Sadness was the dominant emotion toward disability. Findings from 863 Romanian adults without disabilities.
Key findings
1Disability knowledge was strongly associated with assistive-technology knowledge (r = .60, p < .001).
2In the mediation model, the association between disability knowledge and transhumanist orientation was fully accounted for by assistive-technology knowledge (indirect effect b = 0.53, 95% CI [0.17, 0.91]; direct effect b = 0.01, p = .96).
3Sadness was the most commonly reported emotion: 74.9% when thinking about disability and 51.1% when interacting with a person with a disability.
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How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study was explicitly designed as a pilot and exploratory investigation. The cross-sectional design means no causal conclusions can be drawn about the direction of the associations. Several constructs (disability knowledge, interaction valence, assistive-technology knowledge) were each measured with a single self-report item on a 5-point scale. Recruitment was by snowball sampling through social media and professional networks, not random. All participants were without disabilities, so the findings describe non-disabled adults' attitudes and knowledge, not the experiences of people with disabilities. The emotion measure was limited to six basic Ekman categories and did not include empathy, compassion, or acceptance. The mediation model explained only R² = .018 of the variance in transhumanist orientation. The Romanian context has uneven access to assistive technologies, which may shape the knowledge patterns observed.
Declared interests
The authors declared that no financial support was received for the work or its publication.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the mediation as showing that learning about disability causes people to learn about assistive technologies, which then causes them to adopt enhancement beliefs. The design is cross-sectional, the model's R² was .018, and this was an explicitly pilot study with several single-item self-report measures.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →