Quality of Life, Disability, and Hedonic Psychology

Abstract

When people with disabilities are asked about the quality of their lives, they report only slightly lower quality than nondisabled people. Nevertheless, most nondisabled people (especially including bioethicists and health care economists) estimate the quality of life of disabled people to be extremely low, and they sometimes argue that the high QOL reports of disabled people should be discounted. Social psychologists have begun to systematically study human happiness in a new field called hedonics. This paper reports and interprets the recent empirical results of hedonics research to see whether disabled peoples' high reports of their own quality of life are more reliable than the lower estimates of bioethicists and other nondisabled observers. The outcome is relevant to policy disagreements surrounding disability. If bioethicists are correct about the intrinsically low QOL of people with impairments, then the disability rights (DR) movement's political goals of environmental modification are diminished in value. Careful inspection shows that at the present state of research, hedonics is on the side of DR advocates.