Crying during a conflict damages your opponent’s reputation at a cost to your own

In interpersonal conflicts, staying calm tends to protect your reputation, while crying damages the reputation of your opponent alongside your own. This points to a social tradeoff where keeping your cool helps you look good, but shedding tears is more effective if you want to make the other person look bad. These findings were recently published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Conflict between people is a naturally emotional process. When humans face disputes with colleagues, friends, or romantic partners, they often express sadness or anger to navigate the situation. While past scientific work has focused on how expressing emotions affects the person showing them, less is known about how these emotional responses impact the other person involved in the dispute.

Scientists wanted to examine the reputational consequences of remaining calm compared to expressing active emotions like crying or yelling. They aimed to understand whether different emotional responses create different social tradeoffs for both the person expressing the emotion and the person receiving it.

“Current emotion research focuses extensively on expressive emotions i.e. crying or yelling and suppressive emotions with little mention of stoicism lying in the middle of these two. And most of this research explores how emotional responses shape evaluations of emotional actors but not how emotional responses shape evaluations of emotional recipients who elicit these emotions,” explained study author Zihan Yang, a senior undergraduate student at University of Pennsylvania.

To test these ideas, the researchers conducted a series of five experiments involving over 3,000 adults in the United States who matched the general population’s demographics. In the first three experiments, the scientists presented participants with hypothetical conflict scenarios. These included a poor performance review at work, a dispute over a shared project, teasing from a colleague, romantic disagreements, neighbor complaints, and a sports team conflict.

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In Study 1a, which included 392 participants, and Study 1b, with another 392 participants, individuals read scenarios where a character responded to a conflict by either yelling, crying, or remaining stoic. Remaining stoic meant staying calm, thanking the person, or simply dropping the issue. Participants then rated both the acting character and the conflict partner on their professionalism, their value as a social partner, and how much blame or praise they deserved.

Study 1c involved a much larger sample of 1,162 participants and added computer-generated images of the characters to make the emotions more visually apparent. Across all three of these initial experiments, the researchers observed a consistent pattern regarding the acting character’s reputation. The character who remained stoic was evaluated significantly more favorably than the character who cried.

The character who yelled received the worst reputational evaluations of all. However, when it came to the conflict partner’s reputation, the effects shifted. The researchers found that when the acting character cried, the conflict partner was judged much more harshly than when the acting character yelled or remained stoic.

This provides evidence that crying inflicts a unique reputational cost on the other person in a dispute. Yelling, on the other hand, tended to be highly costly to the person yelling but failed to impose similar reputational costs on the conflict partner. This suggests that while anger displays might serve other functions like intimidation, they do not undermine an opponent’s social standing the way tears do.

In Study 2, the scientists wanted to see how people view these dynamics when they imagine themselves in a dispute. They recruited 383 participants and asked them to imagine being the main character in a workplace and a teammate conflict. The participants rated how likely they were to respond with stoicism, crying, or yelling in both public and private settings.

They also estimated how each emotional response would impact their own reputation and their partner’s reputation. The researchers found that participants believed staying calm would make them look the most professional and respectable. The participants expected that crying or yelling would severely damage their own social standing.

At the same time, the participants anticipated that crying would do the most damage to their conflict partner’s reputation. This suggests that people are intuitively aware of the social tradeoffs involved in different emotional expressions. They seem to understand that stoic displays protect the self, while crying punishes the opponent.

Study 3 was designed to capture real experiences rather than imagined scenarios. The scientists asked 633 participants to write about an actual past conflict with another adult. The participants were randomly assigned to recall a time when their conflict partner either cried, yelled, or remained calm.

After writing about the event, the participants rated their own feelings of guilt and how bad they felt about the situation. They also rated how a neutral observer might judge both parties. The researchers found that when a conflict partner cried, it made the participant feel significantly higher levels of guilt compared to when the partner yelled or remained calm.

Participants also expected that neutral observers would judge them most unfavorably if the other person in the conflict had cried. Just as in the earlier experiments, stoic individuals were viewed the most favorably by neutral observers. These consistent findings provide strong evidence for the reputational benefits of keeping your cool.

“Crying imposes reputational costs on conflict partners but also damages cryer’s reputation, whereas stoic displays protect the stoic’s reputation but impose fewer costs on conflict partners,” Yang told PsyPost. “Yelling tended to be costly to the yeller (compared to stoic displays) and failed to impose costs on the conflict partner’s reputation (compared to tears).”

These findings suggest an interesting dynamic in human social interaction, but there are a few limitations to keep in mind. Because the first four experiments relied on imagined situations, the emotional intensity of the conflicts was likely lower than in a real dispute. While the final experiment asked participants to recall real memories, this method relies on human memory, which can be flawed or 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 a stoic response. A stoic display implies that a person feels an emotion but suppresses its outward expression.

If a person simply feels no emotion at all, a calm response might be viewed as cold or inappropriate. Future research should examine whether stoic responses only protect a person’s reputation when others know they are actively suppressing their feelings. It is also possible that cultural expectations play a role in how emotions are judged.

All the participants in these studies lived in the United States. The scientists note that staying calm might be viewed differently in cultures that place a different value on social harmony or emotional expression. Exploring these questions in different cultural groups would help clarify how universal these social rules are.

The study, “Stoic displays have reputational benefits but fail to undermine adversaries,” was authored by Zihan Yang and Cory J. Clark.