How Others Judge You in Moments of Conflict

In moments of intense disagreement, you’re signaling what kind of person you are.

In a new paper, Zihan Yang and Cory Clark at the University of Pennsylvania examine how others interpret those signals. The results are striking. Remaining calm, what the authors call a “stoic display,” consistently improves how others see you. Crying and yelling, by contrast, damage your reputation.

This may seem obvious. But the researchers also discovered something more interesting. How you react during a conflict doesn’t only change how others see you. Your reaction also changes how observers see the person with whom you’re arguing. Making someone cry makes you look cold or insensitive. So tears can damage the other side’s reputation. There’s a catch, though. The person who cries is also seen as less competent, less professional and less desirable as a friend or colleague.

This creates a trade-off. Crying can hurt your opponent’s reputation, but it hurts yours as well. Behavioral stoicism—maintaining a calm outward demeanor during a conflict—does the opposite. It protects your own reputation, but does little to diminish the other person.

This trade-off explains why people handle conflict so differently. Some want to win the argument. Others prefer to avoid losing it, focusing less on persuading others and more on protecting how they are perceived.

From an evolutionary standpoint, emotions are critical signals. They tell people around you something important about your intentions and your attributes. Anger signals that you’re willing to push back. Sadness and tears signal that you need social support. Calm (“stoic display”) can signal inner control and self-mastery. Self-control is one of the most valued traits across almost every area of life. People who seem reliable, disciplined and steady tend to be trusted more, both in personal relationships and at work.

One of the clearest findings in the study is that yelling has almost no advantages. From the observer’s perspective, yelling damages the reputation of the person doing the yelling and does almost nothing to diminish the other side. Anger is sometimes thought to be useful. Showing anger can push others to back down, especially in negotiations. In everyday social conflicts, though, raising your voice is costly. Why?

One reason is that observers seem to distinguish between controlled firmness and losing your temper. Staying firm looks like strength. But shouting crosses a line. It suggests you’ve lost control, which undercuts the very impression of strength you were trying to project.

Another reason is that social norms have changed. In most modern settings, especially at work, noisy expressions of anger are seen as inappropriate. The same behavior that once might have signaled dominance now demonstrates a lack of social finesse.

Crying sits in a middle ground. The authors suggest that tears can sometimes serve a spiteful purpose. They can impose costs on someone else while harming you at the same time. This fits with what we know about human behavior. Crying, of course, is typically involuntary—most people don’t choose to cry. But whether deliberate or not, the social signal it sends is the same. Observers respond to the display itself, not the intention behind it. People don’t always act in purely self-interested ways. Sometimes they’re willing to take a personal hit if it also damages a rival or tips the judgment of onlookers in their favor. In this sense, crying can reframe a conflict. It draws attention to perceived mistreatment and invites others to issue blame.

This is a risky move, though. The same signal that draws sympathy can also lead people to see you as less capable and less professional. As the authors of the study put it, “crying imposes costs on conflict partners but also damages the crier’s reputation.”

If there’s a clear winner across these studies, it’s stoicism. Whether the conflict was at work or in a relationship, staying calm consistently led to improved judgments of the person. That doesn’t mean remaining calm wins every argument or changes the other person’s behavior. But it protects something that often matters more over time: your reputation.

The key insight from this research is not that emotions are bad. It’s that they carry trade-offs. Different responses achieve different social goals, and those goals can come into conflict.

If your aim is to protect your reputation, staying calm appears to be the safest bet. If your aim is to shift blame or elicit sympathy, emotional displays can be more effective, but also more costly.

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A version of this article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal under the title “It’s Cool to Keep Calm.”