Emotional Tears as a Bargaining Tactic of the Weak: Experimental Evidence From Two Countries

Organisms, including humans, would have disproportionately descended from ancestors who, over generations, captured fitness benefits and are therefore expected to be well-designed to procure those benefits. When individuals cannot directly obtain benefits, they may still secure them by seeking assistance from others. Emotional tears may serve as signals through which people influence others to act on their behalf in ways that benefit them, in situations in which their bargaining power is relatively low. Here, we test the hypothesis that, in a conflict between two individuals, people expect the individual with lower bargaining power to be more likely to tear up. We conducted an online experiment with participants from the United States (N = 410) and India (N = 276). Participants read vignettes depicting conflicts between an individual with relatively low fighting ability (a wife, a daughter, or a physically weak man) and another individual with higher fighting ability (a husband, a mother, or a physically strong man), accompanied by images of their faces. Consistent with the hypothesis, participants expected target individuals to tear up more when they perceived them as less physically formidable. However, participants did not consistently expect tears from the weaker individual in a dyad. Overall, the findings suggest that perceived fighting ability may represent an important cue in judgments about the likelihood of tearing up in others. Tears may serve as a bargaining tactic when one’s bargaining potential is low.