ABSTRACT
The various attitudes and patterns of behavior that characterize people who are blind are not inherent in their condition but, rather, are acquired through ordinary processes of social learning. Thus, there is nothing inherent in the condition of blindness that requires a person to be docile, dependent, melancholy, or helpless; nor is there anything about it that should lead him to become independent or assertive. A part of the socialization experience in any society involves learning attitudes, beliefs, and values about stigmatized people such as the blind. These beliefs concern the effects that the condition is alleged to have on personality, and how a person who becomes blind is changed because of it. The beliefs and assumptions about blindness that have been learned through early socialization become the expectations that others have for the blind person's behavior. It is difficult to exaggerate the important role such organizations play in the socialization of the blind.
