Almost everyone agrees that certain professions inspire awe.
War veterans, firefighters, healthcare professionals and teachers ensure our safety, save our lives and nurture future generations. So it’s no surprise that we call them “heroes” — a word that evokes the strength and selflessness that seem evident in the daily responsibilities of these professionals.
The enthusiasm of these sentiments may be welcomed, but recent research indicates that the hero label is also loaded with counterproductive assumptions about these workers’ personal needs and ambitions.
Most people assume, for example, that heroes simply don’t care much about issues such as fair payment for the work they provide.
“This is a clear fallacy of logic and deductive reasoning,” explains postdoctoral researcher Matthew Stanley, from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, in the United States.
And the consequences for the job market can be serious. Stanley’s research indicates that the “heroification” can reduce professionals’ remuneration and lead people to ignore policies that result in poor working conditions.
“We worry less about bad treatment if the exploited people are ‘heroes,'” says Stanley.
Stanley’s inspiration for his research came from healthcare professionals, during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic.
Many people in your social circle, including your wife, struggled with work overload. They felt they were not receiving the support they needed.
“Politicians proclaimed the ‘hero label’ as praise and recognition, but it all seemed very empty,” he says.
Stanley is a psychologist and began to wonder if The very idea of the selfless hero could cause his needs to be ignored. If confirmed, this would influence conditions in many other professions besides medicine.
Together with Fuqua School of Business Professor Aaron C. Kay, he designed a series of studies to evaluate the people’s assumptions about “heroic” professions. The result was two studies, one of which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology last year.
In one, the more participants viewed educators as altruistic, the less they opposed a theoretical policy that would reduce teacher pay.
In the two initial surveys, Stanley and Kay confirmed that people view war veterans as much more heroic citizens than the average American. This impression is linked to the perception of altruism and personal sacrifice.
“People think of them in incredibly positive terms—they want to have them as friends, coworkers, and neighbors,” explains Stanley. “They form the group of heroes par excellence.”
Next, psychologists examined people’s perceptions of what jobs veterans should pursue after leaving the military.
In several questionnaires, participants considered that veterans would be better suited to positions that involve service to others, such as fundraisers, paramedics or home caregiversto the detriment of jobs with higher pay and associated with greater self-interest, such as private bankers or insurance brokers.
Stanley and Kay observed very similar responses when they asked participants to consider how veterans would fit into specific organizations.
The result was that survey participants felt that someone coming from the military would be more suited to a job at Habitat for Humanity (which helps build homes for low-income families) than at multinational investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Basically, the researchers concluded that reinforcing the hero stereotype increases the effect size. When participants observed a logo saying “hire our heroes” Alongside their questionnaires, for example, they were even more likely to endorse charitable work for war veterans.
Of course, some veterans do prefer a lower-paying job that involves serving others, but there is wide variation in people’s preferences.
Stanley suspects that these structural assumptions may unfairly encourage individuals to pursue professions that meet the altruistic stereotype.
It’s easy to imagine, for example, how the hero stereotype might influence the career advice they receive or employers’ hiring decisions, making them more likely to enter these professions at the expense of other sectors.
Stanley and Kay’s second study looked at the ways in which Heroification can encourage workplace exploration in many different fieldssuch as teaching, nursing, social assistance and the police sector.
Participants were first asked to rate whether the typical worker in each profession was a hero, on a scale from one (definitely no) to seven (definitely yes). Then they needed to estimate the probability that that person would volunteer to work an extra day without pay.
As expected, participants’ responses were correlated. When participants considered a profession to be heroic, they had much higher expectations that professionals would sacrifice their rest day without pay.
The researchers’ final experiments studied participants’ opposition to policies that would harm professionals’ rights. Would the hero label reduce or increase people’s indignation at news of teacher pay cuts, for example?
To find out, the psychologists provided text detailing a policy to cut school budgets and asked them to state their position on a scale of one (strong opposition) to seven (strong support). In some cases, the text was accompanied by a drawing of teachers dressed in superhero costumes; in others, participants only observed the text.
Perhaps one would expect that the natural respect we have for heroes would diminish support for pay cuts – but that is not what happened.
Apparently, thanks to the association with selfless altruism, participants tended to show less opposition to politics when they looked at the illustration of teachers in superhero capes.
“It’s brutally ironic,” says Stanley. “Our veneration makes us more tolerant when they are treated badly.”
Matthew Stanley’s findings coincide with the views of intensive care nursing professor Nicki Credland, from the University of Hull, in the United Kingdom. She argues that the narrative of hero can harm the knowledge and education of his colleagues.
“[Ela sugere que] we do our work because we have a calling and an innate desire to help people,” she explains. “But that’s as true about nursing as it is about many other professions.”
“And it causes negative impacts when we want to be adequately remunerated for the knowledge and techniques we have”, says the professor.
Other psychologists also praised the new study. Professor Sapna Cheryan, from the University of Washington in Seattle, United States, states that the results are fully in line with the scientific literature on “positive stereotypes”.
She compares the study to the idea of “poor but happy” – the notion that people with lower incomes somehow live simpler, happier lives, which can reduce people’s concerns about the causes of inequality.
“We give people a little bit of positivity and then we harm them,” she says.
Organizational behavior professor Nadav Klein, from the Insead Business School campus in Fontainebleau, France, agrees that this is possible, but argues that more research will be needed to demonstrate the influence of heroification on real-world behaviors.
Like other prejudices, it arises from our tendency to draw conclusions based on “insufficient knowledge of others”, he explains.
“People can make wrong assumptions based on tiny information.” This heuristic is common in human reasoning and decision-making – and can be very difficult to correct.
The most obvious solution might be discourage the use of the “hero” label, but Stanley believes that it would not be viable. The term is used so often to convey respect that it would be difficult to convince people to stop using it, he said.
He believes the answer may lie in cultivating greater awareness of the many reasons that might make someone choose a “heroic” profession, in addition to the desire to help others. A person may join the military to undergo job-specific training and education, for example.
Stanley’s research concluded that Describing these reasons can prevent people from making incorrect assumptions about your subsequent career choices.
“We should teach the public what these people really want, so they can make less use of ‘caricatures’ and stereotypes,” explains Stanley.
In fact, we are all multifaceted individuals, with many parallel needs and ambitions. And recognizing this fact does not necessarily lessen our respect and admiration for those people who keep us safe, secure and healthy.
*David Robson is an award-winning science writer. His next book (in English) is called The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies that Will Transform Your Life, to be published in June 2024 by Canongate (in the United Kingdom) and Pegasus Books (in the United States and Canada) . His account on X (formerly Twitter) is @d_a_robson. He can also be found under the handle @davidarobson on Instagram and Threads.
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