Author Archives: Meredith Carroll

Middle-of-the-road stances risked alienating allies and opponents alike, research found

How do you navigate political discussions?  

You might expect, as many people do, that expressing “two-sided” or ambivalent positions about controversial political issues could help you bridge divides. In particular, you might expect that expressing ambivalence would make you more likeable to allies and opponents alike.  

A new study coauthored by DePaul Assistant Professor of Marketing Geoff Durso found exactly the opposite. Expressing ambivalence was not only unhelpful when it came to winning over opponents on contentious issues. It also hurt study subjects’ standing among those on the same side of the issue at hand.  

As a marketing professor with a background in psychology, Durso often works at the intersection of consumer behavior and political sentiment.   

Read on for a discussion of why the study’s results surprised him, what might explain the findings, and how insights from marketing and politics can inform each other. 

Or: Watch a video version of the interview on our YouTube channel, part of an ongoing series highlighting Driehaus faculty and what their research can teach us about the world around us.  

On politics as identity 

Driehaus College of Business (DCOB): What were your expectations going into this study? Did it surprise you to find that expressing ambivalence didn’t help — or in some cases even hurt — people’s likeability?  

Geoff Durso (GD): People generally like others who share their position. Then, if you think of people who disagree with you, it seemed reasonable to predict that expressing conflict in your own position might communicate some degree of respect or credence to your opponents’ position at the same time. So when it comes to both groups, you might expect that expressing two-sided opinions would be beneficial to people’s popularity, a sort of middle ground that everyone respected. But we find precisely the opposite pattern.   

My so-called position allies — those who agree with me on an issue — don’t like that I’m conflicted at all. They don’t like that I’m rocking the boat. And to my opponents, expressing conflict doesn’t matter, because I’m against them on the overall position. It doesn’t even register that I feel conflicted, or that my position acknowledges both sides.   

DCOB: How did you go about making sense of those results? Why do you think that was the case?    

GD: The way people think of each other is increasingly polarized. And what’s really interesting about that is that, sometimes, an issue position can become a group identity.   

Say, during the pandemic, I’m pro-mask mandate. But, I express conflict about it. I’m weakening the pro-mask mandate connection among my allies. And when it comes to an anti-mask mandate person, they consider me part of an outgroup “opponent” due to our larger disagreement on mask mandate policies.   

In other words, the nuances in my position don’t even register to opponents. And the same nuance makes my allies feel less connected to me.   

On the connections between marketing and politics 

DCOB: Some folks might be surprised to hear that a marketing professor researches political discourse. What do these two fields have in common?   

GD: I tell my students to think of politics as the marketing of a vote. You might have a dollar and you can give that dollar to any company (or candidate!) based on what products or positions they sell. Likewise, you can also give your vote to a candidate that represents what you want versus the other candidate. Both actions represent consumer behavior. It’s just the currency that varies.   

In other words, a marketplace is not just money, and it’s not just buying things. You can think more generally in terms of choices and decisions between many options in the marketplace. That’s what every marketing campaign has in common, whether it’s toothpaste brands or presidential candidates. The stakes vary, but the underlying marketing processes are similar.     

On where to go from here 

DCOB: Any takeaways from your study results that you think marketers should be paying attention to?   

GD: There’s more and more demand from consumers for brands to make sociopolitical kinds of statements. Our findings suggest that being two-sided about these is going to repel a lot of people. Trying to please everyone with a two-sided sociopolitical statement may simply lead to pleasing no one.   

DCOB: What questions has this research left you with? What do you want to understand better about this issue?   

GD: A truism of psychology is that we judge other people by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions. Expressing ambivalence in our own sociopolitical position may feel personally right (we intend to bridge political divides) but we fail to appreciate how this would be perceived in reality – we may seem inconsistent or waffling, for instance.   

How do you get people to change their expectations around expressing ambivalence? How do you get them to shift away from being focused on their own intentions? Are there ways to generate win-win consensus on divisive sociopolitical issues, and how best to do so? That’s what I’d like to learn a bit more about in my future work. 

Driehaus researchers shed light on weight-based mistreatment in the workplace

Research can be pathbreaking in any number of ways. It can distill received wisdom — or upend it. It can organize existing knowledge or chart a new course forward.

Or, like a paper recently published by four Driehaus researchers, research can put a name to something at once widely experienced and seldom discussed. Mistreatment in the workplace based on weight is an unfortunately familiar fact for those who experience it. But it’s rarely talked about: not among leadership; not in the media; and not even, thanks to shame and stigma, among those who are harmed by it.

“We wanted to study something that is real,” said Jaclyn Jensen, a professor and the associate dean for student success at Driehaus, and one of the study’s authors. “We wanted to shed light on something important that we think people are overlooking.”

On why weight-based mistreatment has gone unchecked

Jensen and her coauthors — fellow management and entrepreneurship faculty Grace Lemmon and Goran Kuljanin, along with Doctorate in Business Administration student Renee Chu-Jacoby —  published the results of their work in October.

Across two studies, the team found that weight-based mistreatment is as widespread as it is damaging.

In the U.S., for starters, 75% of the workforce counts as “overweight” or “obese.” (That’s according to the Body Mass Index: a widely used measure that is also widely criticized.)

As part of their study, the Driehaus team surveyed 1,008 adults who fell into this category. Among that sample, 758 people — or 75% — had been mistreated at work because of their weight within the past six months.

Together, these numbers sketch the outlines of a pervasive phenomenon, reinforced by widespread cultural stigmas. These stigmas, the researchers speculate, are part of why the problem has gone unchecked for so long.

“In our culture, we believe that if you’re larger, you’re responsible for being larger,” said Lemmon. “Larger bodies are associated with less competency, less warmth, more selfishness.”

“This is a topic that crosses the personal and professional divide,” added Jensen. “We maybe don’t have scripts that tell us whether we should be talking about it at all. Or, if we are, why we’re talking about it. Those guardrails just aren’t there.”

On why weight-based mistreatment can be hard to spot

For those who experience it, weight-based mistreatment is many-faced, many-formed. Jensen, Lemmon, Kuljanin, and Chu-Jacoby worked with a smaller study population to account for the full spectrum of how weight stigma shows up in the workplace.

They surfaced plenty of examples of overt, aggressive mistreatment: name-calling, exclusion, physical harassment. They also found examples of larger-bodied workers being perceived as less competent and less professional: of these workers being denied access to information or roles because of their size.

Just as damaging — and perhaps more surprising to those who haven’t faced it— were seemingly benign comments known as “benevolent mistreatment.”

Benevolent mistreatment might masquerade as concern for a larger-bodied coworker’s well-being. It might manifest as the suggestion to opt for a salad over a sandwich, or the snide remark about too many trips to the candy bowl — all directed at larger-bodied colleagues without being levied at smaller-bodied individuals who make similar choices.

Benevolent mistreatment, the researchers found, was just as damaging as other forms. No matter how overt or covert the behavior targeted at them, study subjects were likely to withdraw from work; to experience rumination and shame; or to neglect selfcare.

“[Benevolent mistreatment is] very much somebody entering your personal space: your personal emotional space; your personal cognitive space,” said Lemmon. “It might not be physical in nature. But it is still somebody trying to get their way into your life and control you. There’s an element of control implicit in benevolent mistreatment that’s not present in the other forms of mistreatment. And I think that’s why people react so strongly.”

On the potential costs to organizations

Weight-based mistreatment at work, the study found, is undeniably detrimental to workers’ mental health.

Equally, allowing weight-based bullying to proceed unchecked can cost organizations.

“It turns out that how people are treated inside organizations affects their behavior,” said Kuljanin. “That’s why I like this line of work. When you mistreat people, you’re clearly not getting the best out of them.”

The team hasn’t yet had the chance to quantify the impact of weight-based mistreatment on organizations. But, given the scale of the problem and existing research in workplace climates, they conjecture that these costs include lost productivity, deteriorating collaboration, and difficulty attracting and retaining talent.

“We’re social creatures,” Kuljanin said. “We talk about each other and gossip all the time. Organizations develop reputations. And so if you’re an organization that has a reputation for this kind of mistreatment, then you’re going to be missing out on a whole bunch of talent.”

On where to go from here

An issue so widespread, the researchers stressed, will necessitate solutions at any number of levels: from organizational culture right through to public policy.

As for what organizations can do? According to the team, existing research suggests that culture changes happen on many fronts. It happens when organizations change their policies. It happens when leaders draw a clear line. And it happens when all workers — but particularly those in positions of power — give one another models of how to act with compassion and empathy.

When workplace culture does shift, though, that change tends to be pervasive. It’s less about a shift in any one kind of behavior, said Jensen, than it is about a shift in the values underlying people’s choices.

“Take trying to diminish sexual harassment,” she said. “The message isn’t just, ‘respect your female colleagues.’ The message is, ‘all your colleagues deserve to be valued.’ So there are ripple effects. Those types of environments see less sexual harassment. But they also see less of other kinds of harassment, too.”

Compassion and empathy, the authors agree, are two such values that might drive change around weight stigma in the workplace.

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All told, Lemmon, Jensen, and Kuljanin hope that drawing attention to the scope of the problem will be a catalyst for change.

“When you study nastiness in the workplace, you quickly learn that people know it’s going on,” said Jensen. “It’s just that they don’t necessarily want to talk about it. So one of the things that would be good to normalize, for organizations, is this idea: Not talking about it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”

“If the thrust of our outreach is awareness,” said Lemmon, “we’re happy.