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Stoicism doesn’t win every argument but it protects your reputation.
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.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge and is the best-selling author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”