Hard to Be a Hero - Causes and Consequences of Occupational Heroism Perception

Abstract

I had the pleasure to present some results of our research project on occupational heroism at the BPS Division of Occupational Psychology conference in Cardiff. I presented reasons to be careful with framing occupations as heroic: correlational evidence points to heroism perception acting as a moral shield. Indeed, the more people perceive an occupation to be heroic, the more they want to de-regulate an occupation and protect rule-breaking workers from prosecution. In addition, heroism perception is associated with decreased acceptability of criticism of the workers. Acting as a moral shield, the heroic rhetoric might come with the risk of creating an environment enabling misconducts by reducing public scrutiny of workers breaking the rules.