The temptation to place military veterans on a pedestal for their numerous admirable qualities is certainly understandable. There is growing evidence that these urges should be resisted, however, as they may actually do more harm than good for the veterans themselves.

For instance, research from the University of Cincinnati found that while veterans obviously don’t wish to be stigmatized, they also don’t really want to be lionized either.

“If you’re a veteran, everyone assumes that you’ve been in combat or shot people or you have post-traumatic stress disorder,” the researchers explain. “But it was interesting to see that putting veterans on a pedestal has similar negative effects.”

Negative impact

A second study, from Duke University, argues that our tendency to lionize veterans may even funnel them into lower-paying careers that are seemingly well suited to their selfless personalities.

“We know that veterans face issues with unemployment and underemployment, but we also know that the public holds overwhelmingly positive views of veterans as a group. The public’s views of veterans are so positive that the entire group is often given the hero label,” the researchers explain.

They conducted 11 experiments to explore why it is that veterans offer suffer from higher rates of unemployment, while also earning less money in the jobs they do manage to secure, even when they are often venerated as heroes.

Unhelpful stereotypes

The answer may lie in the stereotypes that so often surround veterans. For instance, in one experiment participants were asked to rank careers based on how selfish they believe the typical person working in that field was. A second group of volunteers then ranked the careers best suited for military veterans.

The results suggest that people were most likely to believe that careers where a low level of selfishness was desirable, such as in healthcare or teaching in a public school, would be a good cultural fit for veterans while also allowing them to utilize their skills.

The researchers then tested whether this remained the case when people were informed that veterans enlisted in the military for another reason than wanting to serve their country. In this instance, the fictional veteran was interested in improving their technical skills.

When the volunteers were asked to assess whether the fictional individual would be better suited to a job at Goldman Sachs or Habitat for Humanity, they were more likely to pick the former after the veteran was framed in a less selfless way. This underlines that framing people in a less positive way could actually benefit their careers.

“We typically don’t think that describing groups in such extremely positive terms (as heroes) could actually have negative effects on group members,” the researchers explain. “But in the case of veterans, people see them as a better fit at jobs, roles and organizations that they associate with selflessness, which tend to be lower paying.”

Serving others

The results highlight that the more heroic someone is perceived as being, the more likely we are to believe that their entire career should be spent at the service of others. While this is not negative in and of itself, such roles also tend to be paid less than roles perceived as being more suited to less selfless individuals.

It’s a problem that the researchers found also applies to other roles that are commonly framed in heroic terms, including nursing, social work, and firefighting. In experiments, they found that people were far more likely to believe that people in such selfless professions would want to donate to charity, and indeed to donate in larger amounts, than their peers in less selfless professions.

This reinforces the sense that people in professions viewed as heroic are expected to sacrifice themselves for the “greater good”. This could mean that veterans are more likely to be given a chance in lower-paying, service-oriented roles, even if those roles don’t match their needs and experiences.

“There are lots of reasons why Americans enlist in the military, and we should not assume that veterans want to make a career out of serving others, especially at the expense of other needs and desires,” the authors conclude. “By funneling veterans into specific jobs, organizations, and careers associated with selflessness, we may be unfairly limiting their agency and limiting their options.”