The Psychological Stigma of Unemployment: When joblessness leads to being jobless.

Abstract

In three studies, we find that a psychological stigma against the unemployed exists, occurs instantaneously, is difficult to alleviate, and leads to hiring biases. This stigma-based account of the unemployed stands in contrast to economic theories purporting that perceivers rationally judge the employed based on skill deterioration caused by long unemployment durations. Study 1 and 2 demonstrate that psychological stigma occurs and leads to hiring biases, holding constant qualifications and minimizing unemployment duration. Moreover, rationales indicating the controllability of unemployment-onset (i.e., voluntarily left vs. laid-off), a causal dimension that has been found to mitigate negative responses toward stigma in past research, did not alleviate stigma. This may have occurred because of perceivers’ fundamental tendency to overemphasize internal/dispositional explanations for target outcomes. Study 3 supports this reasoning as we found that providing a rationale indicating causal externality (i.e., employer bankruptcy), to correct for this attribution bias, alleviated unemployment stigma and bias.