“Insults are a weapon,” he says Cynthia Wangclinical professor at the Kellogg School and executive director of Kellogg’s Center for Dispute Resolution and Investigations. “It’s a metaphorical sword that people wield to hurt the other side.”
For two decades, Wang has studied how people, including stigmatized groups, respond to insults by taking control of language. They don’t just absorb insults thrown at them. they fight back. But they do it in different ways. Some openly claim the libel: “I am X.” While others flatly reject it: “I’m not X.”
In research with Gloria Cheng and Jennifer Whitson of UCLA, Wang compared these two strategies to determine which might be more effective at neutralizing an attack—and what happens when people use these strategies.
The answer cuts both ways. Retrieving an insult, which the researchers call self-labeling, proved more effective in depleting the power of the word. But people who used this approach suffered in the eyes of observers, who judged them to be less likable and less likely to be hired or promoted.
“If the stigmatized team is able to wrest control of this sword, then the other team cannot easily use it as a weapon,” Wang says. But controlling the takedown comes at a personal cost.
Two words, many experiments
For the research, Wang and her colleagues conducted a total of seven studies. Most followed a similar arrangement: Participants observed a member of a stigmatized group either claim or reject an insult. They then reported how negative or offensive the word seemed and how they felt about the person who used it.
The team tested this effect in very different groups, settings and insults.
In one study, for example, participants imagined scrolling through social media platform X and seeing a post from a Latino in their feed. Half saw a post where the man claimed an insult again: “I am a [slur],” while the other half saw a post where the man dismissed the same insult: “I’m not [slur].” In another study, participants viewed a slide from a student’s presentation on sexual violence, with a title that either retrieved or rejected an insult aimed at women. Yet another study focused on an entirely fictitious ethnic group and a fictitious smear, which helped rule out the possibility that participants were simply reacting to words they already had deep-seated feelings about.
In these tests, a pattern emerged: when someone retrieved an insult, observers rated the word as less negative than when the person rejected the word. But observers also rated the person who claimed the word as less likable and less deserving of a job or promotion. Dropping the insult, meanwhile, was kinder to the person but did less to discredit the word.
This trend was also applied to realistic settings. In one of the studies, participants believed they were having a live conversation with another participant named Minji. Midway through the experiment, Minji mentioned that she had a personal blog that, in its title, either claimed or denied an insult aimed at Asians. The participants were then told that they would do a second task in pairs, where one person would lead and the other would help. They then individually answered whether Minji deserved the role of leader.
Participants who saw the blog title where Minji repeated the insult were significantly less likely to support Minji for the leadership role. Therefore, causing stigma by self-labeling had real costs.
The tension below
Why does an act that weakens an offense turn out to hurt the person using it? The researchers found two mechanisms pulling in opposite directions.
When a stigmatized group claims an insult as its own, observers see that group has seized power over the word. “Once the stigmatized group owns or controls the label, then other groups cannot use it as a weapon,” explains Wang.
At the same time, when someone takes ownership of a word, even if it is to reclaim an insult, they challenge the social order that the word helps to enforce. Some people experience this challenge as a threat to a world they are comfortable with.
“People who really like the way things are don’t want to change things and feel threatened by self-labeling efforts,” says Wang. “That’s what creates this backlash against the self-described person.”
Studies bear this out, as reactions have been concentrated among observers who strongly believe that existing social hierarchies are just and legitimate.
Need for organizational support
In light of these findings, Wang’s first solution for people weighing how to respond to an insult is simply awareness. The two different strategies—recovery versus discarding an insult—have different consequences, and it’s worth understanding the trade-off before choosing which one to pursue.
But Wang is quick to say that the deeper problem is not one that individuals must solve on their own.
Many organizations now actively encourage employees to bring their whole selves to work and speak out against bias. While these are worthy commitments, they also come with a complication that employers rarely recognize.
“It hurts people to challenge these stigmas, so organizations probably shouldn’t put the onus on them; they shouldn’t fight them,” says Wang. “This approach may have individual implications for those in minority groups who are trying to promote this change.”
This is the silent trap that research reveals. When workers from stigmatized groups confront insults directed at them, they help erode the power of those insults by providing a genuine collective good. However, the same act can cost them sympathy, raises, and promotions, robbing them of the very organizational position they would need to drive change on a larger scale. Challenging stigma makes a person less powerful, and less power makes stigma harder to challenge.
Breaking that cycle, Wang argues, means shifting the burden away from individuals and institutions through policies that directly address discriminatory language, protect the people who speak out, and address the responses to threats that cause the backlash in the first place.
“Organizations need to think not only about the collective ramifications, but also the individual ramifications,” says Wang. The people most effective at challenging a stigma, her research warns, are very often the ones paying for it.
