Dehumanization of dirty workers and attitudes toward social support

Journal of Applied Social Psychology. 2019. Vol. 49. No. 12. P. 767–777.

Terskova M., Agadullina E.

In lay perception, dirty work is a type of labor that degrades human dignity. Work can be perceived as dirty on three bases: social (related to the subordinate position or associated with contact with stigmatized people), physical (related to direct contact with garbage and waste) and moral (related to jobs considered sinful, dubious or defying social norms). ‘Dirty’ stigma makes workers objects of dehumanization and discrimination, in particular, people distance themselves from dirty workers and are not ready to help and support them. In the experimental study (N = 340), we investigated how certain types of dirty workers are dehumanized compared to non-dirty workers and the indirect effect of the type of dirty work on attitudes toward social support of dirty workers via animalistic (attribution of uniquely human traits) and mechanistic (attribution of human nature traits) dehumanization. The results show that individuals are willing to offer more social support to a low-status but not dirty worker rather than to social or moral dirty workers. At the same time, less social support is provided to non-dirty than to physical dirty worker. Animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization mediates the relationship between the types of dirty work and the attitudes towards social support. In particular, less dehumanization leads to more positive attitudes towards social support. The limitations and future directions of the obtained results are discussed.

Keywords: attitudes, humanity, dehumanization, dity work