Keep Calm and Protect Your Reputation
– by Zihan Yang and Cory Clark
Crying may seem more like an act of vulnerability than aggression, but one person’s tears can tarnish two reputations. In a recent paper, we explored the reputational consequences of different emotion expressions in interpersonal conflicts. Across five studies and more than six interpersonal conflict scenarios (e.g., between colleagues, teammates, roommates, same-sex friends, romantic partners, neighbors), people who cried did the most damage to their conflict partner’s reputation but also suffered reputational damage themselves. In contrast, actors who kept their cool (what we call a “stoic display”) protected their own reputation but imposed fewer costs on conflict partners.
These findings suggest that tears and stoic displays pose opposite tradeoffs: crying undermines one’s opponent, but also oneself, whereas stoic displays protect oneself, but also one’s opponent.
Emotions have adaptive roles in humans’ lives and often occur within a dyad. They can serve important social functions by allowing humans to communicate their internal state to interlocutors and to interpret the internal states of their interlocutor. Past research has focused primarily on the reputational consequences for those who express emotion. For example, when an individual cries, this can help elicit emotional support but also can make the crier seem less competent (Barthelmas et al., 2024; Hendriks et al., 2008). Displays of anger can lead to status conferral but can induce fear at the same time (Tiedens, 2001; Yun and Jung 2022).
However, interpersonal conflicts occur when two parties have competing goals, and so emotions in such conflicts can signal information about both parties involved. Because people are highly motivated to seek social information about others, when people observe interpersonal conflicts between two other people, they likely seek to understand how at fault each party is. Each party’s emotion expression can serve as useful cues as to who wronged whom and how severely. If one person yells or cries, third party observers might infer that that person is unhinged but also that they may have been wronged by their conflict partner.
We conducted five studies with over 3000 census-matched US participants and more than six interpersonal conflict scenarios, in which participants were randomly assigned to read that an actor cried, yelled, or maintained a stoic display (e.g., “dropped it and said nothing”). In Studies 1a-1c, participants read vignettes about interpersonal conflicts from the perspective of third-party observers, such as a noise complaint between two neighbors or a domestic dispute over one partner spending too much time at work. In Study 2, participants were asked to imagine themselves as the actor in an interpersonal conflict, such as receiving a seemingly unfair performance review at work. And in Study 3, participants were asked to recall real-life conflicts where their conflict partner displayed anger, sadness, or kept their cool.
Then we asked participants to evaluate the actor–the one who expressed the emotion–and the recipient–the conflict partner who received the emotion expression on items such as how blameworthy vs. praiseworthy they were, whether they seemed like a good or bad social partner, and whether they seemed like a good or bad person.
Across all studies, we found very consistent and strong effects that stoic displays were reputationally advantageous compared to crying or yelling. Actors were always evaluated the most positively when they kept their cool. However, when it came to the reputation of conflict partners, crying tended to damage recipient reputations more than stoic displays or yelling. Thus if one’s goal is to make a conflict partner look bad, crying does the most damage. These findings suggest that stoic displays and crying have opposite tradeoffs: crying damages the crier’s reputation, but also imposes costs on conflict partners, whereas stoic displays protect the stoic’s reputation but also do little damage to the conflict partner’s reputation.
We also observed that anger displays damaged the actor’s reputation compared to stoic displays and failed to damage the conflict partner’s reputation compared to tears. These patterns suggest that yelling primarily makes the yeller look bad. Anger displays likely serve other functions, such as intimidating interlocutors into acquiescence. However, these benefits come at a reputational cost: angry people are viewed as undesirable social partners.
Our studies did not directly test the psychological mechanisms underlying our results, but one possibility is that tears serve as evidence of harm. When someone cries, people may infer that the conflict partner caused harm to the person. At the same time, a person seen crying may be viewed as an unstable or needy social partner–a person who will take more than they give (see, e.g., Aquino et al., 2026). Calmness leaves less visible evidence of harm and makes the conflict seem more ambiguous. But maintaining composure in the face of conflict may be viewed as a temperamental virtue. Therefore, stoic displays can minimize perceptions of the hurt felt by the stoic, enabling both parties to avoid reputational costs.
The proverb “living well is the best revenge” is in some sense false. Merely carrying on through conflict poses minimal costs on conflict partners, but it does appear to be the best buffer against mutual destruction.
References
- Aquino, K., Thau, S., Graso, M., Clark, C., Lagios, C., Restubog, S. L. D., & Lu, T. (2026). The reputational consequences of victim signaling. Personality and Individual Differences, 250, 113515. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2025.113515
- Barthelmas, M., Stockle, D., & Keller, J. (2024). On the social signal function of emotional crying: Broadening the perspective to social interactions in daily life. Emotion, 24(4), 960–974. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001313
- Hendriks, M. C. P., Croon, M. A., & Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M. (2008). Social reactions to adult crying: The help-soliciting function of tears. The Journal of Social Psychology, 148(1), 22–42. https://doi.org/10.3200/SOCP.148.1.22-42
- Tiedens, L. Z. (2001). Anger and advancement versus sadness and subjugation: The effect of negative emotion expressions on social status conferral. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(1), 86–94. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.80.1.86
- Yang, Z., & Clark, C. J. (2026). Stoic displays have reputational benefits but fail to undermine adversaries. Evolution and Human Behavior, 47(4), 106858. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2026.106858
- Yun, D., & Jung, H. (2022). Anger expression in negotiation: The effects of communication channels and anger intensity. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 879063. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.879063
