Suspicious Minds: How Perceptions of Victim Signaling Shape Workplace Relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Organizations have recently experienced an increase in employees openly discussing personal experiences of victimization, presenting both opportunities and challenges for workplace relationships. The present research introduces the concept of perceptions of workplace victim signaling (WVS) — defined as an employee’s subjective appraisal of the frequency with which other employees at work publicly communicate their disadvantages, suffering, oppression, or personal limitations. Drawing on paranoid cognition theory (Kramer, 2001), we predict that perceptions of WVS can trigger paranoid cognitions, leading to their expectations of adversarial conflict with coworkers from social groups different from their own (i.e., race, gender, and political orientation). We further propose that these expectations can result in increased withdrawal behavior and a lower tendency to support coworkers. We test our predictions across four studies (N = 1240)—one cross-sectional study, two time-lagged studies, and a preregistered experiment. The results provide support for our theoretical model, offering novel insights into some of the inadvertent consequences employees experience when they perceive frequent expressions of victimization by others at work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".