Disability and Aging Discrimination: Perspectives in Law and Psychology

Two things are certain in the contemporary workplace: the aging of employees, and negative attitudes toward them - especially those with disabilities--by younger colleagues and supervisors. Yet related phenomena seem less clear: how do negative stereotypes contribute to discrimination on the job? And how are these stereotypes perceived in legal proceedings?

Bringing theoretical organization to an often unfocused literature, Disability and Aging Discrimination offers research in these areas at the same level of rigor as research into racial and gender discrimination. The book applies Social Analytic Jurisprudence, a framework for testing legal assumptions regarding behavior, and identifies controversies and knowledge gaps in age-discrimination and disability law. Chapters provide historical background or present-day context for the prevalence of age and disability prejudices, and shed light on the psychosocial concepts that must be understood, in addition to medical considerations, to make improvements in legal standards and workplace policy. Among the topics covered:

- Applying Social Analytic Jurisprudence to age and disability discrimination.

- The psychological origins and social pervasiveness of ageism.

- Growing older, working more: the boomer generation on the job.

- Limitations of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

- Disability and procedural fairness in the workplace.

- Cross-cultural perspectives on stigma.

The first volume of its kind, Disability and Aging Discrimination is essential reading for researchers, forensic and rehabilitation psychologists/psychiatrists, and those involved in the well-being of older and disabled workers.

Professor Wiener received his Ph.D. from the University of Houston and his Masters Degree in Legal Studies at UNL. He was professor of Psychology at Saint Louis University (1982- 2000) and most recently chair of the Department of Psychology at Baruch College, City University of New York. In 2002 Dr. Wiener joined the Law-Psychology Program (as director) and the Social Psychology Program at UNL. He is the former editor of Law and Human Behavior, the official journal of the American Psychology/Law Society (Division 41 of the APA). Dr. Wiener’s research applies theories of social cognition to problems in legal decision-making. Among the topic areas he has investigated are perceptions of sexual harassment and jury decision making. Specifically, Dr. Wiener studies the role of generic prejudice in criminal cases and he studies how jurors reach capital murder decisions in assigning penalties. The National Science Foundation has funded and continues to fund this work. Currently, Dr. Wiener applies social cognitive theories of emotion, motivation, dual process of cognitive processing to explain how legal actors reach decisions relevant to law and policy. Other topics of investigation include the role of implicit attitude activation in generic prejudice, the role of emotions in jury judgments as they develop across the presentation of criminal cases, the role of mortality salience in death penalty judgments, and the role of counterfactual thinking in negligence judgments. Dr. Wiener teaches courses at UNL on behavioral sciences and the law and legal decision making.