Modest victims: Victims who decline to broadcast their victimization are seen as morally virtuous
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What do people think of victims who conceal their victimhood? We propose that the decision to not broadcast that one has been victimized serves as a costly act of modesty—in doing so, one is potentially forgoing social support and compensation from one’s community. We posit that individuals who are less demanding and more cooperative are more willing to forego these benefits, such that burying one’s victimhood can serve as a costly signal of virtue. Through a mathematical model, and five empirical studies conducted on Prolific Academic and a university subject pool (total n = 2896), we support the hypothesis that people who decide not to advertise their victim status can be perceived as more cooperative social partners. Moreover, we find that the reputation benefits of burying versus broadcasting can persist even when broadcasting can function to warn other potential victims of an ongoing threat (Study 2), and in contexts where broadcasting would elicit sympathy from observers (Study 3). Interestingly, however, we find that the reputation costs of broadcasting can be mitigated when broadcasting is directed at a smaller audience of close ties (versus a broader audience that includes weak ties) (Study 4). We also find that buriers are seen as less demanding than broadcasters (Study 4), and provide evidence that attributions of reduced demandingness may underlie preferences for buriers: when participants have access to direct information about a victim’s level of demandingness, the reputation benefits of burying relative to broadcasting are attenuated (Study 5). Together, this research suggests that declining to broadcast one’s status as a victim is perceived as a costly signal of virtue.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".