Venting isn’t just cathartic, it’s competitive

If someone has deeply upset us — or even just mildly ticked us off — it's likely that we'll turn to a friend to complain. And while some position this venting as a way to blow off steam and calm down, some may use it for a different purpose: gaining allies within a social group.

Writing in Evolution and Human Behavior, UCLA's Jaimie Krems and colleagues say that venting can actually act as a form of competition between friends, making listeners like the venter much more, and their subject much less.

In the first four studies, participants were randomly assigned to read vignettes about social venting. All vignettes started by asking participants to imagine that they were listening to an old friend talking about another friend who had cancelled plans at the last minute. In the venting condition, the speaker prefaced their complaint with a statement about feeling hurt and upset, while in the derogation condition the speaker more forcefully described the mutual friend as a "stupid asshole".

There were also neutral conditions, including one in which the friend gossiped, rather than vented, about another absent person, and another in which they vented about an object, rather than a person. After reading the passage, participants then rated how much they liked and felt close to both the speaker and the target of their speech, as well as whether they felt the speaker was a victim.

The results showed that participants did indeed like speakers more than targets when they vented to them, and felt closer to them; speakers were around 27% more liked than targets in this condition. This wasn't the case when speakers were derogatory or when they gossiped, where speakers and targets were liked roughly the same amount. This suggests that venting can be an effective tactic in gaining allyship in a social group.

Next, the team looked at how people might behave having listened to someone vent. Again, participants read a vignette in which a speaker either vented about or was derogatory towards a mutual friend. This time, though, they were also asked to take part in a version of the 'Dictator Game'. They were given ten tickets, each of which would give the holder the chance to win a car, and asked to allocate them between the speaker and their target.

In line with the previous study, venting caused listeners to allocate more tickets to speakers over targets than derogation (speakers received on average 6 out of the 10 tickets in the venting condition compared to 5 in the derogation condition). And again, participants also preferred speakers over targets after listening to them vent. This was replicated in the sixth and final study.

So, it seems, venting provides a social purpose, helping people form alliances in social groups. Whether or not people are aware of this is a different question, and future research could explore the reasons people vent; while the team argue that venting is not proven to be particularly cathartic, it's unlikely that everyone ranting about a friend is doing so for Machiavellian reasons.

It would also be interesting to look at social dynamics more generally. Many social groups have implicit or explicit hierarchies — so what would the impact be if someone with low social capital in a group vented about someone with relatively higher social capital? More naturalistic settings could help researchers explore this further.

Either way, the study highlights how friendship — and friendship groups — can be a little more ruthless than we might like to think. "People are so lonely right now, and that puts even greater pressure on us as researchers to be honest about how friendship works," lead author Jaimie Krems shared in a press release. "As much as we want it to be all unicorns and rainbows, sometimes it's more like a koala: cuddly but also vicious."

Read the paper in full:

Krems, J. A., Merrie, L. A., Rodriguez, N. N., Williams, K. E. G. (2024) Venting makes people prefer—and preferentially support—us over those we vent about. Evolution and Human Behavior, 45(5) doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2024.106608

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