In interpersonal conflicts, you can protect your reputation by staying calm, but crying can damage your reputation as well as that of the other person. This illustrates the social trade-off that keeping calm makes you look good, but if you want to make someone else look bad, crying is more effective. These findings were recently published in the journal evolution and human behavior.
Conflict between people is a naturally emotional process. When humans are faced with conflicts with co-workers, friends, or loved ones, we often express sadness or anger to help us cope with the situation. Previous scientific research has focused on how expressing emotions affects the person expressing them, but less is known about how these emotional responses affect the other person involved in the conflict.
Scientists wanted to find out what effect staying calm has on your reputation compared to expressing active emotions like crying or screaming. They aimed to understand whether different emotional responses induce different social trade-offs for both those expressing the emotion and those receiving it.
“Current emotion research focuses broadly on expressive and repressive emotions, such as crying and screaming, with little mention of asceticism, which lies in between these two. And most of this research focuses on how emotional responses affect the emotional subject’s evaluations. “We are investigating how emotional responses shape recipients’ evaluations of the emotions that elicit these emotions,” explained study author Jihan Yang, a senior undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.
To test these ideas, the researchers conducted a series of five experiments on more than 3,000 U.S. adults whose demographics matched those of the general population. In the first three experiments, scientists presented participants with hypothetical conflict scenarios. These include poor performance reviews at work, arguments over shared projects, teasing from coworkers, romantic disagreements, neighbor complaints, sports team conflicts, and more.
In Study 1a, which included 392 participants, and Study 1b, which included an additional 392 participants, individuals read scenarios in which characters responded to conflict by screaming, crying, or remaining calm. Remaining stoic meant staying calm, appreciating the person, or simply abandoning the problem. Participants then rated both the acting character and the conflict partner on their professionalism, value as social partners, and how much blame or praise they deserved.
Study 1c involved a larger sample of 1,162 participants and added computer-generated images of the characters to more visually reveal their emotions. In all three of these initial experiments, the researchers observed a consistent pattern regarding the reputations of the acting characters. Characters who remained stoic were far more likable than characters who cried.
The character who shouted had the worst reputation rating. But when it came to the reputation of the disputants, the impact changed. Researchers found that if the acting character cried, the opponent was judged much more harshly than if the acting character screamed or remained calm.
This provides evidence that crying imposes unique reputational costs on disputants. On the other hand, while yelling tended to be very costly for the yeller, it did not impose similar reputational costs on the disputants. This suggests that although expressions of anger may serve other functions, such as intimidation, they do not undermine the social status of the other person, as tears do.
In Study 2, the scientists wanted to examine how people view these dynamics when they imagine themselves in a controversy. They recruited 383 participants and asked them to imagine being the protagonist of a workplace or teammate conflict. Participants rated how likely they were to react stoically, cry, or scream in both public and private situations.
They also estimated how each emotional response affected their own reputation and that of their partner. The researchers found that participants believed they looked most professional and respectable if they remained calm. Participants expected that their social status would be significantly impaired if they cried or screamed.
At the same time, participants predicted that crying would cause the most damage to a disputant’s reputation. This suggests that people intuitively recognize the social trade-offs associated with different emotional expressions. They seem to understand that displaying stoicism protects them and crying punishes the other person.
Study 3 was designed to capture real-life experiences rather than imagined scenarios. Scientists asked 633 participants to write about actual past conflicts with other adults. Participants were randomly assigned to recall a time when their partner in the conflict cried, screamed, or remained calm.
After writing about the incident, participants rated their own guilt and how bad they felt about the situation. They also assessed how a neutral observer would judge the parties. The researchers found that participants felt significantly higher levels of guilt when their conflict partner cried compared to when their partner screamed or remained calm.
Participants also predicted that neutral observers would make the most unfavorable judgments if the other party in the conflict was crying. As in previous experiments, stoic individuals were viewed most favorably by neutral observers. These consistent findings provide strong evidence for the reputational benefits of staying calm.
“Crying not only imposes reputational costs on the disputant but also damages the cryer’s reputation, whereas a stoic display protects the stoic reputation but imposes fewer costs on the disputant,” Yang told SciPost. “Yelling (compared to stoic expression) tended to be costly to the shouter, and (compared to tears) it could not impose costs on the reputation of the disputant.”
Although these findings suggest interesting power relations in human social interactions, there are some limitations that should be kept in mind. Because the first four experiments were based on imagined situations, it is likely that the emotional intensity of the conflicts was lower than in real disputes. The final experiment asked participants to recall actual memories, but this method relies on human memory and can be flawed and biased.
The researchers recommend that future studies recreate these social environments in more realistic settings, such as using virtual reality. Another detail to consider is the nature of the Stoic response. A stoic display means that a person feels emotions but suppresses their outward expression.
If a person is not feeling any emotions, a calm response may be seen as cold or inappropriate. Future research should consider whether responding stoically only protects one’s reputation when one knows that others are actively suppressing one’s emotions. Cultural expectations may also influence emotional judgments.
All participants in these studies lived in the United States. Scientists say that staying calm may be viewed differently in cultures that place different values on social harmony and emotional expression. Exploring these questions in different cultural groups can help reveal how universal these social rules are.
The study, “Stoic Attitude Benefits Reputation but Doesn’t Undermine Adversaries,” was authored by Zihan Yang and Cory J. Clark.
