When the unemployed complain of fighting an uphill battle to
reenter the job market, believe them.
Through a series of simple experiments, researchers from UCLA and
the State University of New York–Stony Brook found that out-of-work
Americans face discrimination that is unrelated to their skills
sets or to the conditions of departure from their previous
jobs.
"We were surprised to find that, all things being equal, unemployed
applicants were viewed as less competent, warm and hireable than
employed individuals," said lead researcher Geoffrey Ho, a doctoral
student in human resources and organizational behavior at the UCLA
Anderson School of Management. "We were also surprised to see how
little the terms of departure mattered. Job candidates who said
they voluntarily left a position faced the same stigma as job
candidates who said they had been laid off or terminated."
The findings will be presented at an April 10 conference on
unemployment at UCLA.
With a special emphasis on the psychological impact of being out of
work, the conference, "Reconnecting to Work: Consequences of
Long-Term Unemployment and Prospects for Job Creation," will bring
together Ho and 31 other researchers on labor and unemployment.
"To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the
psychological stigma of unemployment," said Margaret Shih, a
co-author on the study with Ho and an associate professor of human
resources and organizational behavior at UCLA Anderson. "We found
that individuals tend to make negative associations with those who
are unemployed, which often leads to unfair discrimination."
Researchers have long known of the existence of a bias against the
unemployed, said the study authors, who also include Todd L.
Pittinsky, an associate professor of technology and society at
Stony Brook, and Daniel Walters, a UCLA Anderson M.B.A.
student.
In fact, economists have determined that the longer individuals
remain unemployed, the lower their chances of finding work. But
until now, the situation has been attributed to legitimate concerns
over the unemployed worker's skills set or a lack of persistence in
looking for work.
"Economists have tended to chalk up long-term unemployment to the
probability of skill decay or discouragement, or employers'
perceptions of skill decay," Shih said. "But we're finding that
when there's no evidence that skills have deteriorated, out-of-work
job applicants are still at a disadvantage. The stigma may help
explain why the unemployed may have systematically lower chances of
reconnecting to work."
For a series of studies, Ho, Shih and their colleagues recruited a
random cross-section of Americans over the Internet and had them
appraise fictitious job candidates. The researchers found that even
when study participants were evaluating the same evidence about a
job applicant, the unemployed applicant was at a disadvantage
compared with the employed applicant.
In one study, Ho and Shih presented study participants with the
same fictitious resume. They told half the participants that the
resume belonged to an employed person and the other half that it
belonged to a person who was out of work. The researchers then
asked participants to rank the worker on qualities that have been
shown by psychological research to be paramount in forming a
desirable impression of an individual.
Although all participants saw exactly the same resume, they
perceived the "unemployed" resume as belonging to somebody who was
less competent, warm and proactive than the "employed" resume. As a
consequence, participants reported that they would be less willing
to interview or hire the individual who was out of work than the
employed individual.
Ho and Shih found the same results when participants were presented
with a short video of a job interview, a richer source of
information about the supposed job candidate. Participants who
believed the job candidate was employed perceived the interview to
be more impressive than participants who believed the job candidate
was unemployed.
The researchers also discovered that providing different reasons
for unemployment did not alleviate the stigma. It made no
difference whether the job applicant was unemployed because he left
voluntarily or was terminated or laid off. Only when the job loss
was in no way attributable to the individual — such as bankruptcy
on the part of the employer — did the disadvantage of being
unemployed disappear.
Moving forward, the UCLA–Stony Brook team plans to explore what, if
any, role the state of the economy plays in the psychological
stigma of unemployment. They also plan to sample human relations
professionals to determine whether they share the same prejudices
as the general public.
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Thanks to University of California - Los Angeles for this
article.