How do we investigate gaslighting? So gaslighting, to my knowledge, is not a crime anywhere, but the effects and the reasons for gaslighting somebody can be awful in the workplace, right? So gaslighting is the use of psychological means to make somebody doubt their own sanity. And if someone is gaslighting a person because of their race, gender, national origin, that could be something that violates a law.
The other way that gaslighting can come up is that if gaslighting creates a hostile work environment, it could be contrary to a law. We can investigate gaslighting though with comparators, right? So is somebody gaslighting an entire department, that’s going to get super hard because it just starts to look like a person is doing it to everybody, but we have that same dynamic if somebody is a bully or just mean to everybody anyway. So we’ll be familiar with that type of analysis. Generally speaking, if somebody is accused of gaslighting, we’re going to look at who they’re gaslighting and are they in fact gaslighting? Are they tricking people into thinking things other than reality? And you know, the questions about that probably are dependent on the underlying nature of the thing we’re investigating, the work that people are doing. But gaslighting investigations can be super hard because it’s so much about subtleties.
