ABSTRACT
Most blindness workers have found themselves preoccupied with other, more immediate problems in the day-to-day operations of the organizations and agencies for which they work. This chapter considers briefly some of the major explanations that have been proposed for the attitudes and behavior patterns of the blind. Commonsense explanations of blindness are part of the folklore of our culture. These explanations rest upon the implicit assumption that blind people possess personalities and psychologies that are different from those of ordinary people. A final criticism of the psychological explanation of blindness is that it attempts to explain the behavior of a blind man solely in terms of the condition's effects upon basic intrapsychic processes. The stereotype explanation correctly sensitizes us to the unwitting, yet crucial, role that the sighted play in this unhappy state of affairs. The most difficult problem of this research has been to obtain valid, reliable, and complete data on blind people and blindness agencies.
