Key findings
- It may feel good to take out your frustration with one friend on another, but it doesn’t necessarily reduce the anger.
- Experiments have shown that people who listened to a friend vent their anger liked and supported that friend more than those they were venting their anger about—but only when the person venting their anger did not belittle or appear aggressive toward the other friend.
- Letting off steam can be an effective tool in the competition for the audience’s favor, precisely because it is not easily recognized as such.
Taking out your frustrations about one friend on another isn’t necessarily cathartic, but it can make the friend you’re talking to like you more and treat you better, say psychologists at UCLA. Their experiments show that under certain conditions, it can be an effective form of competition, causing listeners to feel closer to the person venting their anger and less liking of the victim.
But that wasn’t the case when friends openly disparaged others. The real benefit of letting off steam, the researchers concluded, is in strengthening bonds that could pay off in the future – and in the improved health and happiness of people who are popular with their friends.
“We’ve known since the 1950s that the Freudian catharsis explanation for venting is wrong. It can feel good to vent, but venting doesn’t reliably reduce anger and sometimes even increases it,” said lead author Jaimie Krems, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA. “We didn’t have a good explanation for what venting does to us. So we tested a novel alliance view of venting — that venting, under certain parameters, can make the people we vent to support us, rather than the people we vent about.”
Most research on close relationships has focused on romantic partnerships. But for younger people in particular, friendship plays a role that is traditionally found in romantic relationships; the US Survey General also referred to it as the “loneliness epidemic”. Researchers say there is a need to better understand friendship, including how people “compete” to be liked more by their friends than by other friends.
“As willing as people are to admit that we compete for our partners’ limited time and affection, they seem unwilling to admit that we compete for friends,” Krems said. “But if being relatively more popular means getting more support from friends, then we should expect some competition for friends, whether we like it or not.”
In a paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior, Krems and colleagues at Oklahoma State University and Hamilton College asked participants to listen to a friend venting anger, gossiping about, or belittling a mutual friend. Although the vignettes varied from experiment to experiment, participants venting anger typically began by telling participants, “I’m so frustrated and hurt right now…” before going on to vent about a mutual friend canceling on them at the last minute.
In the exception condition, this complaint was preceded by the remark, “I am so frustrated and angry right now…” In other conditions, the participant heard the speaker gossiping about a dinner with a mutual friend or venting anger about the speaker’s car problems.
After reading the vignette, participants rated their feelings toward the speaker and the target on an 11-point scale. Participants who heard people rant about a friend canceling on them liked the speaker more than the target. This was not the case when speakers disparaged the target for the same behavior, spread neutral gossip about the targets, or ranted about their car problems.
In another experiment, participants heard their friends vent their anger at the victim or belittle them, and were asked to divide a pot of lottery tickets between the speaker and the victim. Participants gave more tickets to the speaker than to the victim, but only in the condition in which they vented their anger—not in the condition in which they belittled.
However, in another experiment, venting turned out to be a mistake. When researchers suggested that the person venting secretly had a rivalry with the target friend, participants stopped liking that person more than the target.
The results show that letting off steam makes the speaker more likable only when listeners do not perceive that the speaker has aggressive intentions toward the target. This suggests that letting off steam may be an effective tool in competing for listeners’ affection precisely because it is not readily recognized as such.
The benefits of being relatively more popular with one’s friends may include preferential treatment, as in the ticket example above, but there may also be less tangible effects. For example, friends are associated with better economic mobility, health, well-being, and longevity.
The researchers stress that this competition does not have to be conscious, and some other scientists have suggested that such tactics might work best if we fool ourselves into thinking we are not competing. If we don’t believe we are doing it to be aggressive, others might be less likely to recognize that we are engaging in an act of aggression.
The researchers also highlight how venting can fail, for example when those venting are perceived as aggressive, choose the wrong thing to do, or pick the wrong person to do it with. The fact that venting works at all suggests that people strategically decide, even if not consciously, what to let out and who to let out with.
“People are so lonely right now, and that puts even more pressure on us as researchers to be honest about how friendship works,” Krems said. “As much as we want it to be all sunshine and roses, sometimes it’s more like a koala: cuddly, but also vicious.”
