‘Heroisation’ of workers funnels them to lower paying roles

Military veterans are often venerated as heroes, but this positive public feeling doesn't always translate into clear benefits. In the US, for example, military veterans suffer from a higher unemployment rate than their peers, and often earn less than non-veterans with the same qualifications, write Matthew L Stanley and colleagues in a new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Cognition. 

Through a series of 11 individual studies, the team now provides compelling evidence that these disadvantages happen at least partly because veterans are viewed as heroes. Their research shows that the US public perceives veteran 'heroes' to be selfless people who are better suited to lower-paid jobs with, for example, an aid agency rather than an investment bank, even if they hold the necessary qualifications and experience to work at either. "This work not only offers insights into an important real-world problem, but also offers a first experimental investigation of the consequences and implications of labelling a group of people as heroes," they write.

In initial online studies, Stanley and his colleagues first established that US military personnel and veterans are indeed viewed as heroes by US residents. They also found that judgements about the heroism of military veterans closely tracked the participants' perceptions of veterans' selflessness, willingness to sacrifice for others, and their willingness to serve others. 

In a subsequent study, 311 US-based participants were given a list of 10 jobs that had previously been identified as either 'self-focused' (such as being a real estate agent, insurance agent, or private banker) or 'other-focused' (such as a firefighter, fundraiser, or high school teacher). These participants were told that after four years of active service, a US military veteran was looking for a civilian job. They were asked, for each of the 10 jobs, how appealing the veteran would find that role, how good a fit they would be for it, and how good they would be at it. The team's analysis revealed that the participants felt the veteran would be a better match for the other-focused jobs, rather than the self-focused jobs.

In another of the studies, the team found that a fictional military veteran who was looking for a job in marketing, and who had a relevant college degree and good high school grades, was judged to be better suited to a job with the non-profit Habitat for Humanity organisation (an 'other-focused' organisation) than the investment bank Goldman Sachs. 

In this study, some of the participants were exposed to 'hero imagery' from marketing materials from organisations that try to help US military veterans find jobs. These participants felt even more strongly that the veteran would be better matched to Habitat for Humanity than to Goldman Sachs. 

In yet another study, on a fresh batch of US-based participants, the team found that dialling down the link between 'veteran' and 'hero' had the opposite effect. Stating that the fictional veteran enlisted to acquire specific technical skills, rather than to serve others, reduced the participants' perceptions that an other-focused job would be a better option. 

Of course, other types of job are also widely deemed to be heroic. So the team explored perceptions relating to firefighters and paramedics, as well as veterans, versus a college student. This study of 1,227 participants found that, relative to a college student, firefighters and veterans (though not paramedics) were considered to be better suited to a marketing job with Habitat for Humanity than Goldman Sachs.

Across this suite of studies, the team found consistent evidence that heroising military veterans could lead these people to be 'funnelled' into lower paying jobs, organisations, and careers associated with selflessness. And yet, people join the military for various other reasons, such as to gain specific skills, get funded through college, travel and benefit from job security." Even among those who do join the military to selflessly serve and sacrifice for others, we should not assume that after returning to civilian life, they want to work at a job that requires selflessness (especially at the expense of other needs)," they write. 

More generally, these findings suggest that being labelled a 'hero' — a term often applied to NHS workers, for example — could have downsides for those individuals. Further research could explore the ways in which this effect may change across demographics and cultures, but for now, it seems that we need to be more cautious about using the term, or at least more aware of the double-sided nature of this positive stereotype.

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000336