Destigmatization and Its Imbalanced Effects in Labor Markets

Destigmatization is an understudied social process in which the negative outcomes for a previously stigmatized group improve. We theorize that during a period of destigmatization, the effects of stigma persist more strongly for people stigmatized by association than for those directly stigmatized. We propose that this occurs because, during periods of destigmatization, conscious prejudice has diminished but nonconscious prejudice remains, so people correct for their explicit biases toward individuals with the stigmatizing trait but are unaware of their ongoing implicit prejudice toward those stigmatized by association. Our evidence comes from archival data on individual employment in film during the cold war years in Hollywood. It shows that as the stigma of being on an anticommunist blacklist weakened, the employment penalty for being a coworker of a blacklisted artist was greater than the penalty for actually having been on the blacklist itself. A supplemental experiment, designed to address the limitations of archival data, shows the same imbalanced employment penalties in another stigma currently undergoing destigmatization (that of physical disability). Paradoxically, as stigmas recede, harmful effects persist more for associates of stigmatized individuals than for the stigmatized themselves.