TRANSCRIPT
Bertolt: The classic finding is that people with disabilities are stereotyped as warm, but at the same time as incompetent. Like, you know, for example, you go to a restaurant and you order food, and then the waiter has already cut it in small pieces. The arm that I'm wearing here costs 110 thousand euros!
Bertolt: The instrument that I really love working with is the analog modular synthesizer. We call it the SynLimb.
Vicky: How did it feel playing with it for the first time?
Bertolt: I'm changing the music by thinking something.
Vicky: Hi everyone, I'm Vicky and this is Freaks No More!, the show where we tackle myths about visible and invisible disabilities and neurodivergent brains, and hopefully show you how you can be a bit more kind to people who just experience the world differently. Today we have a very special day and a very special episode. First of all, we are not in a regular studio, we are here at the Doxumentale festival.
And the second reason is because it's our very final episode of Freaks No More! actually, so no more episodes after this. So that's a bit sad. But before we get all sad, I have a brilliant guest with me today.
Our guest today is someone who can teach us about the psychology of dealing with differences. He was named "University Teacher of the Year" in 2024, and he's a professor of psychology at the Chemnitz University of Technology. He was born with a physical disability, and his experience of being othered actually has now led him to be a researcher in diversity and stereotypes. And outside of academia, he's also a DJ and uses his prosthetic arm connected to a synthesizer to control sound and rhythm.
I'm super happy to welcome Prof. Dr. Bertolt Meyer! Thank you so much for being here.
Bertolt: Thank you for having me.
Vicky: You're now actively researching disability and stereotypes-
Bertolt: Yes.
Vicky: from a scientific context. But personally, how did you experience stereotypes? How was it like growing up as a disabled kid?
Bertolt: For me, it was my... I think it was my first day at school. At elementary school I was, uh, yeah. How old are you? Six years old. I mean, I'm old, right? So this was in 1983, I think. So I was meeting my future classmates for the first time, and I think we were all kind of sitting in a circle. And the teacher comes to me and places her hands on my shoulder and like, with her full authority, tells all the other kids, you know, "This is Bertie and he's different. He has a disability. He only has one arm."
And I mean, it came from a good place, I guess, right? I mean, she was trying to be, I don't know, sensitive or whatever. But of course for me, it felt extremely uncomfortable. I remember like, I really wanted to melt into the floor. I really wanted to not be there in this moment.
Vicky: Have you felt that feeling ever since? I mean, as an adult.
Bertolt: Of course. You know, for example, you go to a restaurant and you order food and then the waiter has already cut it in small pieces because they-
Vicky: They think that you can't do it yourself.
Bertolt: Yeah. I mean, so I mean, that's, you know, that's not something terrible, right? And it comes from a place of people want to help.
Any person with a visible physical disability has this experience that people treat you with pity, and pity evokes helping behavior. But this helping is always kind of... it always implies a hierarchy. It's always from top down. So when you have these experiences, you learn that society treats you as lesser.
Vicky: The reason why you wrote your book, which we can see right there, is because of anger. And I wonder why anger, and if that anger is somehow connected to that feeling of pity or shame that you've had to experience over your lifetime.
Bertolt: I was increasingly angry and frustrated by the lack of psychology in public discourse. And that's, that's why I thought, you know, I try and write a book. We have a tremendous body of knowledge in psychology that can explain stereotyping, the polarization of society, culture wars, the rise of right-wing populism really well, and it's not part of public discourse. So as soon as somebody from the social sciences is invited to a political talk show, it's either something, somebody from the political sciences, or especially in Germany, you have some philosopher, explaining you the world.
Vicky: You've written a paper in which you actually found that, um, people with physical disabilities are perceived as warm, but less competent than people who are able-bodied.
Bertolt: Well, I didn't find that. That's the classic stereotype about people with disabilities. Typically, when in everyday language and conversation, we use the word stereotype, it's almost used in an interchangeable way with prejudice and discrimination. But that's not how we use it in psychology.
In psychology, a stereotype is something much more benign and basic. A stereotype is a generalized set of beliefs about the qualities that are associated with people from a certain social group. And oftentimes these are exaggerated beliefs. "Germans are punctual" and "Old people are hard of hearing", or "Italians cook good pasta", you name it. The classic finding is that people with disabilities are stereotyped as warm. So, in terms of, they have good intentions, but at the same time as incompetent, they can't do very much. It's called the paternalistic stereotype. It's similar for old people and it's similar for children.
Vicky: Are stereotypes intrinsic to us humans? So are stereotypes good or bad, or is there something like... Can we categorize them as good or bad?
Bertolt: Stereotypes are extremely useful for us and for our ability to process the complexity of our social environment. You know, our brain is really cheap, in the sense of: it tries to avoid complexity wherever it can. And stereotypes are something like a data compression algorithm of our brain.
And whenever we perceive a person, immediately, and this is automatic, we categorize the person in the sense of, which social categories does this person belong to? Old person, tourist, hooligan, football fan, you name it.
And as soon we do that, we assign the qualities of the category to the person. So, and that is a very, very simple and easy way to look at the world. So it's a reduction of computational power.
Vicky: One thing that you found also in your paper is that people actually with bionic arms and not just arms, but bionic prosthesis, like any sort of prosthesis, are perceived as more competent. So why is that actually?
Bertolt: What our findings show is that a prosthesis like this not just has a functional benefit, in terms of, you know, I can tie my shoelaces with it better than without it. But it also has a tremendous psychological benefit.
I was born missing my lower left arm. If you have one arm less, I mean, people, it's tough, you know? I mean, imagine having only one arm and going to, you know, the swimming pool when you're 12, you know? You really need thick skin, right? You know, people stare at you. People will make fun of you. You know, kids can be cruel. So what I realized when I was going around without the prosthesis and when I met new people or interacted with them, it was always a tad awkward. Right?
Vicky: So now your interactions, is it less awkward and more like curiosity? So people would think like, oh wait, what is this? Can I ask about it?
Bertolt: The moment that technology advanced to this point, where you now have fingers that completely move with, like, several joints and many degrees of freedom and, and also hands that do not come with these skin-colored gloves anymore… And also, you know, so you can like rotate it 360 degrees until the battery is empty. It's not very useful, but it kind of shows that you don't need to adhere to the laws of biology here.
And the moment technology was there, I noticed that people started to treat me differently. It was less awkward, and it was more like a positively connotated curiosity, like especially, you know, if you're on a like on the tram, on public transport and like, especially kids. "Wow, that's so cool".
Vicky: Like a robot or like-
Bertolt: Yeah, exactly. And you know, nobody's ever called me cool because of my disability.
Vicky: But what's the implication of that for people, let's say, who cannot afford a prosthesis?
Bertolt: Don't get me wrong, I'm only describing the phenomenon. Um, and I now basically have a social psychological theory behind, you know, what happens when you strap an expensive piece of bionic technology on the disabled body of a disabled person, right? It offsets the stigma. But I'm not advocating this as... "Well, see? Problem solved! That's the solution for disability". You know, we just strap expensive technology on the disabled body. Problem solved. The arm that I'm wearing here costs 110 thousand euros, right? It's insane.
Vicky: Behind us, we have the spinning wheel. So the spinning wheel is always in our shows. I thought that it would be super cool if with you, we did some facts. Some of them are true. Some of them might be false, right? Then we can discuss. Spin the wheel, and then we see where we land.
Bertolt: Okay!
Vicky: Okay, yellow.
Bertolt: "Stereotypes are bad." From the psychological perspective... stereotypes aren't necessarily bad. Stereotypes can actually paint people in a very positive light. You know, some groups, in some contexts are, for example, stereotyped as very competent and so forth.
Vicky: Is there a way, psychologically, to train our brain to use less categorization, or to not categorize people in certain groups or, or is it something that is ultimately evolutionarily ingrained into us?
Bertolt: Stereotypes themselves, and maybe this might come across as controversial, are not the problem, or are only a part of the problem that is associated with discrimination and a lack of inclusion of people with disabilities.
Vicky: So what is the problem?
Bertolt: The problem is the point where stereotypes turn into behavior. When my stereotypes lead me to discriminate against you. So a stereotype is just a shared, exaggerated, oversimplified belief, period. And it turns into discrimination if this then guides my behavior towards others by discriminating against them in more or less subtle way.
While stereotypes themselves seem to be difficult to change, what is more easier to change is the link between stereotypes and behavior. It's much easier to change someone's behavior than to change the stereotype. But the thing is, if the behavior changes, the stereotype will follow.
Vicky: I want you to spin the wheel again and see where we land.
Vicky: Okay, blue!
Bertolt: "People with physical disabilities are perceived as warmer". Yeah. Uh, generally they are, you know, it's the nice guy in the wheelchair. It's, um, the, you know, the sweet kid with Down syndrome. That's this kind of stereotype. Yeah. It's kind of, it implies cuteness, and "Oh, good for you". And it evokes pity. And on a behavioral level, it will lead to helping, helping behavior. You're willing to help people whom you perceive as warm and incompetent.
Vicky: And you've actually talked about something... about the word "cyborg" and how using that word, or having a perception of that word "cyborg" can actually make people with disabilities be perceived as colder. Why is that?
Bertolt: In one of our studies, we show that people with physical disabilities who wear bionic prosthesis are perceived as much more competent than the stereotype about their group would predict. They're actually perceived almost as competent as able-bodied people. And what we wondered is, but what will happen to the attributions of warmth? So does the increase in competence that I get by wearing a prosthesis like this, does that come with a price tag? And that is, do I have to pay for it with my perception of warmth, in the sense of, okay, I'll come across as more competent, but maybe I'll come across as colder.
Vicky: I wanted to ask you about what you've brought here.
Bertolt: Yeah. Speaking of the cyborg.
Vicky: Yes. Speaking of the cyborg, um, you are also a DJ. And outside of academia, and outside of all the research that you just talked about and all the papers that you've done, you're also a DJ and you what you do is, like, you connect your arm with a synthesizer.
Bertolt: The instrument that I really love working with, when I find the time to make music, is the analog modular synthesizer, which is basically an instrument that you build yourself. And I've brought a tiny, a tiny part of the large amount of technology I have floating around at home.
So basically, I mean, imagine something that looks like this, but just very, very much bigger. And so you see, it's these tiny buttons here that you need to tweak, potentiometers, right? You need to basically, you need to be able to do this kind of movement with it. You know, if you can operate these with two hands, that's kind of nice. And I really can't. And it's really difficult to turn a knob like this with a prosthesis like this, even if you get it into a mode where only two fingers move like this, and it's really difficult to kind of grab it and turn it, it doesn't really work that well.
So can't I just basically take a cable, plug it in here like this, and then take the other end and you know, where is it? Here. And basically, kind of plug it in here, so that I can use the signals that I'm already producing - and that I'm really good at producing - to send it in there. So and that's basically what we did.
We call it the SynLimb. And so what this does is... If I pop it on, so if I swap out my hand for this, and it will convert the signals that the prosthesis picks up from the arm to control the hand, and converts it into an electrical signal that the synthesizer will understand.
Vicky: And how did it feel playing with it for the first time? That's what I want to know.
Bertolt: Kind of difficult to describe how it feels, but the only thing I can say about it, like, the first time when we got it working... It's like a kid in a candy shop. Because seriously, you you- It's to me, it feels like I'm changing the music by thinking something, right? I'm thinking I want to open my hand, and then the music changes in a way that I- that depends on where you put this. Um, it's amazing.
I mean, we don't have like a musical rig here, but I mean, for the sake of purpose, just to demonstrate what it looks like. So basically you can pop this on. And then you switch it on. SSAnd now the little computer that's in the prosthesis is confused, because it realizes that's not the hand that it typically expects.
Vicky: And then you can plug it in in the synth?
Bertolt: And then now if you, if you take the cable and plug that in here, I hope I'm grounded properly. Right. And then now that signal goes in there. And then if this is a working synth, depending on where you plug this, and this can be like a filter, or a sequencer, or an effect module.
Vicky: So what's the future of it? I mean, do you hope that maybe you will make it available for more people in the future?
Bertolt: The idea is to make this open source, in the sense of that people can just download the specs, find the parts in the internet, download the 3D parts for their 3D printer, and build it themselves.
Vicky: We talked so much about stereotypes. What can we do actually, as a society to have a little bit of less prejudice, really?
Bertolt: Unfortunately, there is not a simple answer to that, because if there were, we would have already implemented it.
Vicky: Figured it out.
Bertolt: First of all, we need a compelling narrative, a vision, a story of a better society. We need to paint a picture of a future society that will allow for more people, and for more groups of people to realize their idea of a good life. That, and good old fashioned solidarity. This idea that the stronger shoulders carry more weight than the weak shoulders.
And if you manage to fuse these two ideas, basically this idea of a better pluralism for the future, with a strong touch of solidarity, you know, I think it could turn into something where people think, okay, I might have not fully understood it in its last intellectual detail, but it sounds like something worth fighting for.
We need a political vision and a political class and a political communication that communicates safety. And not safety in the sense of more policemen on the street and less crime. But safety, in a sense of psychological safety, and psychological safety is a core construct, which means I feel like I belong, and I feel like I can be myself without being taken advantage of.
Vicky: So to summarize, we need solidarity. We need to feel psychologically safe and to feel like we belong.
Bertolt: Yes. And everybody does.
Vicky: And we need to have the belief for a better future. And I think that's probably like one of the most important things. We need to have a belief for a better future that we all are collectively responsible for. So thank you.
I think on that note, we can finish, and thank you so much for being here, Bertolt. Thank you so much for showing us the synthesizer, showing us SynLimb. And thank you to you guys, because you are actually our very last audience. It's a very final episode of Freaks No More!, and I'm quite sad to leave this project. It's been my passion project for a long time, and it's been a great privilege to be the host of this show. So thank you.
I'm Vicky, I'm your host, and for the last time, I always sign off on this: Goodbye and remember, be kind, be patient and be understanding!
So thank you so much Bertolt for being here. And thank you so much for you being here!