Crying On Camera Might Be Hurting Your Cause, Not Helping It

Social Media Tears Trigger Skepticism, Not Sympathy, Study Finds

Scroll through any social media feed and someone is probably crying about politics. Climate anxiety TikToks. Grief-soaked tweets about election results. Instagram captions about fear for the planet’s future. Emotional political content has become its own genre online. But a new series of experiments suggests those outpourings may be landing with far more doubt than empathy.

Researchers from Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan ran six preregistered experiments testing how people respond when they encounter a stranger’s political emotions on their screens. Published by Cambridge University Press, the work zeroes in on climate change as its test case. By 2021, TikTok videos tagged “Climate Change” had been viewed over 650 million times, and as of 2023, 66 percent of Americans reported being at least somewhat worried about the issue. Emotional expression about climate change is everywhere. People, it turns out, are often skeptical.

Two questions drove each experiment. Does an emotional expression seem appropriate given the situation? And does it seem authentic, meaning does it genuinely reflect what the person is feeling? Both matter. An emotion that fails either test is unlikely to inspire empathy or change minds. Across the six studies, emotional expression generally scored worse than neutral expression on both counts.

When Emotional Expression Online Fails Even With Allies

In the first two studies, participants read a news article about climate change that included a quote from an ordinary person. Some versions included emotional language, sadness or fear. Others were neutral. Participants rated emotional quotes as less appropriate than neutral ones regardless of whether they agreed with the speaker’s position on climate change. Even people who believed in climate change found emotional expression from a like-minded source less appropriate than a calm, neutral statement of concern. Those who disagreed with the speaker found emotional expression even less fitting.

Study 3 found that including an emotional quote did not reflect negatively on the journalist who chose to run it, suggesting the skepticism attaches to the person expressing the emotion rather than whoever amplified it.

Study 4 put the same emotional statement from a fictional person named Patricia Merrill across three platforms: a private text message, a news article comment, and a Twitter/X post. Researchers predicted that more visible, public platforms would breed more skepticism. Differences existed but were modest, with text messages seen as slightly more authentic than social media posts, though not dramatically so.

Seeing Emotional Expression Online Is Associated With Greater Skepticism

Studies 5 and 6 delivered the sharpest findings. Using controlled stimuli designed to simulate TikTok posts, participants saw Merrill’s post paired with either a sad face, a neutral face, or no face at all. Facial expressions, widely regarded as the most universal form of emotional communication, were associated with lower credibility rather than higher. A visible sad expression made Merrill seem significantly less sincere, less trustworthy, and less appropriate compared to a neutral face or no face at all. Participants recognized the expression as sadness. They were simply less likely to see it as genuine.

Open-ended responses made the reasoning plain. One participant wrote that Merrill seemed “very insincere and manipulative.” Another concluded she appeared to be trying to present herself as a “vehemently concerned individual” to attract sympathy. A third put it directly: “I feel sometimes that people say things like that for social media clout. If they are sincere about climate change, they should not over exaggerate.” Participants shown TikTok posts wrote overwhelmingly about social media and the post itself rather than about climate change, a pattern that did not appear in the Twitter/X condition.

Political Agreement Only Goes So Far

Agreement with the poster’s position offered some shelter. Observers who shared concern about climate change rated emotional expression more favorably than those who didn’t. But shared views were not a full shield: even believers in climate change found emotional posts less appropriate than neutral ones from someone on their own side.

Researchers note that some results, particularly around platform visibility and the role of journalists as gatekeepers, did not follow their initial predictions, and they acknowledge those patterns need further study. Worth noting too: all of this research is specific to climate change and to emotions of sadness and fear. Whether the same patterns hold across other political issues or other emotions remains an open question. Still, the core finding held across six experiments and thousands of participants: public emotional expression is often met with suspicion rather than sympathy.

Writing about television two decades before TikTok existed, one researcher warned that “the sheer magnitude of exposure to others’ emotions must be expected to diminish the intensity of empathic reactivity.” For the millions of people sharing genuine fear or grief about politics online, the scroll has only made that harder to overcome.

---