The ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 has forced governments to impose a lockdown, and many people have suddenly found themselves having to reduce their social relations drastically. Given the exceptional nature of similar situations, only a few studies have investigated the negative psychological effects of forced social isolation and how they can be mitigated in a real context. In the present study, we investigated whether the amount of digital communication technology use for virtual meetings (i.e., voice and video calls, online board games and multiplayer video games, or watching movies in party mode) during the lockdown promoted the perception of social support, which in itself mitigated the psychological effects of the lockdown in Italy. Data were collected in March 2020 (N = 465), during the lockdown imposed to reduce the COVID-19 spread. The results indicated that the amount of digital technology use reduced feelings of loneliness, anger/irritability, and boredom and increased belongingness via the perception of social support. The present study supported the positive role of digital technologies in maintaining meaningful social relationships even during an extreme situation such as a lockdown. Implications such as the need to reduce the digital divide and possible consequences of the ongoing pandemic are discussed.
The present study aims at expanding research on dehumanization in the work domain by exploring laypeople's dehumanizing perceptions towards stigmatized workers. Starting from Hughes’ (1951, Social psychology at the crossroads, Harper & Brothers, New York; Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999, Academy of Management Review, 24, 413) concept of ‘dirty work’, the present research aims to demonstrate that the different types of occupational taint elicit distinct dehumanizing images of certain occupational groups. Employing a cluster analysis, the results showed that workers in the physical taint cluster were most strongly associated with biological metaphors, workers in the social taint cluster were perceived as most similar to objects, and workers in the moral taint cluster were perceived as most similar to animals. The theoretical and practical implications are considered.
The present studies aim to expand research on dehumanization in the work domain by exploring the biologization-an unexplored form of dehumanization that involves the perception of others as infected and contagious-of physically tainted workers. By integrating the literature on biologization with that of disgust and physically dirty work, we expected that the biologization of workers would be explained by their dirty work environment and by increased feelings of disgust towards them. In Study 1, we showed that focusing on a dirty work environment (vs. on the person performing the work) increased feelings of disgust towards workers and, in turn, their biologization. Coherently, in Study 2, we found that a physically tainted occupation (vs. baseline condition) increased participants' feelings of disgust and biological dehumanization towards the worker. In contrast, a non-physically tainted occupation (vs. baseline condition) had no effects on disgust and biologization. The theoretical and practical implications are considered.
Conflict of Interest. The authors do not have any conflicts of interest to report.
Acknowledgments. This work was supported by an Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research(http://www.miur.gov.it/) grant to the authors (PRIN, 2017, 2017924L2B). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
The present work explores whether self-objectification triggered by doing peculiar work activities would increase people's conforming behavior. We conducted an experimental study in which participants (N = 140) were asked to perform a high objectifying activity (vs. low objectifying activity vs. baseline condition) simulating a real computer job. Afterwards, their levels of self-objectification and conforming behavior were assessed. Results revealed that participants who performed the high objectifying activity self-objectified (i.e., perceived themselves as lacking human mental states) more than the other conditions and, in turn, conformed more to the judgments of unknown similar others. Crucially, increased self-objectification mediated the effects of the high objectifying activity on enhancing conforming behavior. Theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.