par Dal Cason, Davide ;Casini, Annalisa ;Hellemans, Catherine
Référence Meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Science (May 27th 2014: KULeuven)
Publication Non publié, 2014
Poster de conférence
Résumé : In the sixties, Kitty Genovese’s murder inspired several studies about witnessing episodes of violence. Latané and Darley (1970) were the first authors to elaborate a bystanders’ behaviour model, permitting to predict helping interventions. Hence, according to these scholars, recognizing the event itself is the first step in order analyse bystanders’ behaviour. Most recently, Bowes-Sperry & O’Leary-Kelly (2005) adapted Latané and Darley intervention behaviour model for bystanders’ of sexual harassment. In line with this research we started to develop a specific model in order to predict what is happening in bystanders’ minds in case of moral harassment at work. Indeed, in last decades physical and psychological violence has begun to be considered not only in everyday context but in specific environments like school and workplace. Compared to other kinds of psychological violence such as bullying or sexual harassment, moral harassment is a less evident phenomenon but at the same time very damaging for employees and companies. Moral harassment is a long term process, with a low immediacy and quite difficult to be recognized given its ambiguous nature. Starting from Bowes-Sperry and O’Leary-Kelly assumptions we claim that in case of moral harassment social influence is the most important factor that permits to recognize the situation. Hence, witnessing isn’t a solitary experience, and our mates could influence our perception, above all when we don’t have a clear idea of what’s going on in front of us. In this sense we expect that, in order to understand complex social dynamics, bystanders will pay attention to both the event and the co-witnesses. And the more they perceive ambiguity the more they will rely on the information coming from co-present people and more precisely they will rely on the emotional expressions shown by other bystanders. In order to test this hypothesis we elaborated an experiment with a visual stimulus and an implicit measure: (1) we realized a video reproducing a moral harassment situation in a real work setting, and (2) the Implicit Association Test – IAT – (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) was administered to the participants after watching that video on ad hoc conceived “shared” screen. IAT allows us to investigate which elements bystanders were paying attention to, and it help us to avoid social-desirability bias. So IAT performances can reveal if people are really looking for social cues, such as gazing, to solve the dilemma: is it moral harassment, on not?