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Who Is Seen as a Victim? How Prototypes Shape Judgments of Workplace Harassment

An article published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin co-authored by GSEM Professor Ignazio Ziano and Evan Polman (AV����Ƶ of Wisconsin-Madison) investigates how people mentally picture victims of workplace harassment—and how these prototypes influence their judgments.

Across 13 pre-registered studies with participants from France, the UK, and the US, the authors found that people consistently imagine victims as more introverted, less attractive, shorter, larger-bodied, and less successful than others. When a victim fit this prototype, ambiguous harassment was more likely to be labeled as such, and perpetrators were more strongly blamed and punished—by both the general public and trained professionals. Attempts to reduce this bias through explicit instructions were unsuccessful, underlining how powerfully and unconsciously these prototypes shape perceptions of harassment.

ABSTRACT

What do people think of when they think of workplace harassment? In 13 pre-registered studies with French, British, and U.S. American adult participants (N��= 3,892), we conducted a multi-method investigation into people’s��social prototypes��of victims of workplace harassment. We found people imagined such victims in physically, socially, psychologically, and economically different ways compared with non-victims: for example, as less attractive, more introverted, and paid less. In addition, we found ambiguous harassment leveled against a prototypical (vs. non-prototypical) victim was more likely to be classified as harassment, and perceived to cause the victim more psychological pain. As such, both lay-people and professionals wanted to punish harassers of victims who “fit the prototype” more. Notably, providing people with instructions to ignore a victim’s personal description and instead assess the harassment behavior did not reduce the prototype effect.

The study is available open access:

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