Humans have a strong impulse to help others because of biological, social, and cultural factors.

This impulse can misfire when sighted people use mental shortcuts to decide how to help blind people.

To offer more appropriate help, sighted people need to listen to the expert testimony of blind people.

Many years ago, I was playing with my niece, who was only one year old at the time. She was happy and excited. In her enthusiasm, she threw an object that opened a small cut on my forehead. She immediately cried out in despair, “My friend is hurt!” She wanted someone to help me.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that humans are born to help. In fact, helping behavior in humans evolved from the psychological processes that motivated mutual cooperation in ancestral hominids (Buss, 2016; Hepach et al., 2020).

The evolutionary origins of cooperative helping gave rise to social and cultural practices, norms, values, etc., that govern cooperative helping in humans today. The combined influence of biological, social, and cultural factors underlie the strong impulse to help that most of us experience when we see someone in need.

But this impulse can misfire, as it sometimes does in situations where nondisabled people try to help people with disabling impairments, such as blindness. Sighted people often feel confident that their vision provides more reliable knowledge about their surroundings than blind people get from their nonvisual senses. Blind people, on the other hand, claim that their training gives them the cognitive skills needed to gain reliable knowledge about their surroundings. The result is miscommunication and, often, highly stressful interactions, especially for blind people who frequently deal with these situations.

This post explores reasons for help-related miscommunication between sighted and blind people. My goal is to encourage sighted people, who obviously are concerned with the well-being of others, to offer more effective help to people who are blind.

The Development of Instrumental Helping

Instrumental help occurs frequently in blind-sighted interactions. “Instrumental help” is the provision of concrete, practical, direct assistance to another who is trying to achieve a goal (Brownelle et al., 2013; Svetlova et al., 2010).

As we........

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