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A Psycholegal Model of Hostile Environments: The Role of Dehumanization

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Justice, Conflict and Wellbeing

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Abstract

The United States Supreme Court has held that hostile work environment sexual harassment is unwelcome conduct, based on sex, which is “sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of employment and create an abusive working environment”. Hostile environments can be extended to other federally protected factors such as race and ethnicity, national origin, age, and disability, and even unprotected factors such as social class, education level, and sexual orientation. The authors propose a psycholegal model to find where the law of hostile environments and the psychology of dehumanization intersect. Specifically, the authors propose that two types of dehumanization result in hostile environments: animalistic and mechanistic. As a result, the integration of social psychology and law can shed light on the study of discrimination law.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Upon appeal, the Second Circuit Appellate Court disagreed with the summary judgment and sent the case back to the district court for further processing of the hostile work environment claim where it is still under litigation.

  2. 2.

    The ADEA considers individuals 40 years or older to be members of the protected class.

  3. 3.

    Note that there are many other claims that are actionable under the Fair Housing Act including claims for reasonable accommodations for disabled individuals and for unfair rent and loan policies practiced against all protected classes including race, color, religion, sex, familial status, and national origin.

  4. 4.

    As of the time of that we wrote this paper (April 2013), the federal courts had not accepted sexual orientation as a dimension that created protected classes as they have done under some circumstances for gender, race, national origin, religion, age, and disability.

  5. 5.

    One possible explanation for the predictive power of animalistic dehumanization in this context is that people who associated women with animals did so because they saw women as an out-group. People who hold hostile sexist attitudes toward women (Glick and Fiske, 1996) likely do so because they see sexuality not as a characteristic that differentiates the self from others but because it differentiates an in-group (men) from an out-group (women).

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Richard L. Wiener, Sarah J. Gervais, Ena Brnjic & Gwenith Nuss

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  1. Richard L. Wiener
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Correspondence to Richard L. Wiener .

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

    Brian H. Bornstein

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

    Richard L. Wiener

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Wiener, R., Gervais, S., Brnjic, E., Nuss, G. (2014). A Psycholegal Model of Hostile Environments: The Role of Dehumanization. In: Bornstein, B., Wiener, R. (eds) Justice, Conflict and Wellbeing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0623-9_3

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