Being seen as a victim can bring sympathy, support and even a moral halo. But a new set of experiments finds that people who decide not to tell the world they were wronged earn something too: they are judged as more moral, more trustworthy partners.
The research comes from Nathan Dhaliwal of the University of Saskatchewan’s Edwards School of Business, Jillian Jordan of Harvard Business School and Pat Barclay of the University of Guelph. The paper was posted as a preprint on PsyArXiv on August 7, 2024.
Keeping quiet as a costly signal
The authors draw on costly signalling theory. Victims who speak up can collect compensation, sympathy and help. Staying silent means giving those benefits up, which the authors describe as an act of modesty. People who are less demanding, and who care more about the welfare of others, should be more willing to pay that price, so “burying” victimhood can work as an honest signal of good character.
They backed the idea with a mathematical model and then five studies with a total of 2,896 participants, recruited on Prolific and from a North American university subject pool. Participants read short scenarios about someone treated unfairly, such as being passed over for a promotion, fired, or denied a job, and rated the victim.
Broadcasters paid a reputational price
In the first study, with 232 participants, the victim who kept quiet scored 6.95 out of 9 on a composite of morality, trustworthiness and expected good behaviour. A victim about whom nothing more was said scored 5.83. A victim who complained around the office or posted about it on social media scored 4.70. Speaking up widely actually made people look worse than simply being a victim.
There was one downside to silence. The quiet victim was rated somewhat less competent, 5.52 against 6.09 for the baseline victim.
The second study tested whether going public looks better when it warns others about a perpetrator who is likely to strike again. It did not: silent victims still came out ahead. The third study used 12 different scenarios, including a restaurant patron facing racial discrimination and a store vandalised with prejudiced graffiti, and found the same pattern even in situations where broadcasting would draw sympathy.
Telling close friends is different
The fourth study, with 899 participants, separated broadcasting widely from confiding in a few close people. Victims who told only close friends or relatives were rated no less moral than those who told no one, and more moral than those who went public. Silent victims were also rated as less demanding than both kinds of broadcasters.
The fifth study, also with 899 participants, gave people direct information about how demanding a victim was in general. With that information in hand, the reputational penalty for broadcasting shrank significantly, which the authors take as evidence that perceived demandingness drives the effect.
The authors stress that their results say nothing about whether victims ought to stay silent. Speaking up can warn others, bring perpetrators to account and direct compensation to people who need it, and confiding in close ties can be a healthy way to manage hard emotions.
They also suggest a limit worth testing: when speaking out carries a real risk, such as being fired, broadcasting may start to look courageous and silence may start to look cowardly.
Study Details:
- Title: Modest victims: Victims who decline to broadcast their victimization are seen as morally virtuous
- Authors: Nathan A. Dhaliwal, Jillian J. Jordan, Pat Barclay
- Journal: PsyArXiv preprint (Harvard Business School working paper)
- Publication Date: August 7, 2024
- DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/astzc