The Reputational Consequences of Victim Signaling

The authors examine how victim signaling, defined as publicly sharing experiences of suffering caused by disadvantage, harm, or limitations, affects how observers perceive the signaler. They conducted four studies (NTotal = 1430) on diverse samples (i.e., online participants and professionals in the Philippines), using different methodologies (i.e., employee-coworker dyads and vignette-based experiments), and ways of victim-signaling (i.e., contentious vs. subtle). Across contexts, they found that people who signal their victimhood were evaluated more negatively than those who did not emit this signal, despite the latter facing similar circumstances. The authors found this effect on a range of social judgments, including ratings of dark traits (dark triad and D) and perceived desirability of the signaler as a social partner (e.g., job performance ratings and perceptions of counterproductive workplace behavior). A post-hoc analysis in studies 3 and 4 found that political beliefs moderated perceptions of victim signalers from minority groups; compared to conservatives, liberals were less likely to see victimhood signalers (vs. non-signalers) as narcissistic and psychopathic (study 3) and were less likely to infer entitlement–machiavellian traits from a victim-signaling candidate (study 4). Their results contribute to understanding how victim signaling shapes social perception and the complexities of interpreting claims of harm.