Dr. Kristina Diekmann is the Daniels Professor of Business Ethics and a Professor of Management at the David Eccles School of Business. She recently finished co-authoring a paper, “Double-Victimization in the Workplace: Why Observers Condemn Victims of Sexual Harassment”, illustrating how “passive” victims of sexual harassment in the workplace are often unfairly condemned by coworkers.
Diekmann has an interest in people’s subconscious forecasting errors. She says, “Everyone believes they’ll take action against offensive behavior, but they might in fact do the same thing as a person they deem passive.” An example of this erroneous thinking is how people envision they’d react if they were the ones being harassed. When they look at a hypothetical scenario, most people believe they would report the harassment, leave the room, or speak up. The errors take place “because when we forecast what we will do, we think about it abstractly rather than in the moment with the details and specifics.”
In the recent research, Dr. Diekmann and co-authors look at how these forecasting errors cause a passive victim of sexual harassment to be condemned by co-workers. Findings of the research show that when a person is harassed and does not take action to stop the harassment (the typical response), co-workers are less likely to want to work with him or her or recommend that person for a job. The more action a person predicted they would take against the harassment, the more they condemned the passive sexual harassment victim.
Co-workers think things like, “If that were me, I wouldn’t allow that to continue;” or “I would report the harassment immediately.” Diekmann adds, “They are speculating how they believe they would act based on their abstract view of the situation and imagine they are the type of people who would take action without looking at the details of why a victim doesn’t take action.”
The actual victim might be in fear of losing their job, being ostracized, or being left out of future opportunities; and therefore he or she doesn’t take action against the harassment. Their research argues that one reason we have these forecasting errors is because we fail to understand the motivations we will experience during the actual event. Diekmann explains, “When we predict what we would do, the motivations that are salient are ‘I need to stop the harassment’, but when in the moment, the motivations are ‘I need this job’ or ‘I need to get along.’” The research shows there are ways to help people be cognizant of prediction errors and less condemning of passive sexual harassment victims.
When people were asked to think about the important motivations experienced in the action situation, people were less likely to predict they themselves would take action if sexually harassed. Research also showed that when people looked at the important motivations, observers were less likely to condemn the passive victim. It goes on to say that observers who were asked to think about a past situation when they were intimidated, but not sexually harassed, were less likely to condemn the passive victim.
Find more information about the new research here.