A new study published in Evolution and Human Behavior suggests that venting about a mutual friend can shift social dynamics in your favor. Researchers found that venting makes listeners feel closer to the speaker and less favorable toward the person being talked about. The effect, however, vanishes when the venting appears to be overtly derogatory or driven by personal competition. The new findings suggest that venting can serve as a subtle social tool.
Venting, the act of expressing frustrations about one person to another, is a familiar and widespread human behavior. Traditionally, most research has framed venting as a form of emotional release, rooted in the Freudian concept of catharsis. According to this theory, people vent to offload anger or frustration, expecting that doing so will provide emotional relief.
However, past studies have shown that venting does not reliably reduce negative emotions, and in some cases, it can even make people angrier. As lead author Jaimie Krems, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA and director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research, explained, “Since the 1950s, we’ve known the Freudian catharsis explanation for venting is wrong. It can feel good to vent, but venting doesn’t reliably decrease anger and sometimes even amplifies anger.”
This raised the question: if venting doesn’t consistently provide emotional relief, why do people continue to do it? The researchers suspected that venting might fulfill a strategic, social function rather than merely an emotional one. They proposed a novel “alliance view” of venting, suggesting that venting could be a tactic for securing more affection and support from friends.
In addition, the researchers aimed to fill a gap in relationship research. While much of the existing literature has focused on romantic relationships, they emphasized that friendship also plays a critical role in people’s lives, especially for younger individuals. The researchers recognized the need to better understand the complexities of friendships, particularly how people might compete for the attention and affection of their friends.
“We simply don’t study friendship enough,” Krems told PsyPost. “It’s a hugely important and massively understudied topic — and one where the (paucity of) existing work tends to focus on the unicorns and rainbows. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s like loneliness sucks and that friendship is hard. This work speaks a bit to the challenges of capturing friends’ affections.”
To test their theory, the researchers conducted six experiments with a total of 1,723 participants, who were recruited through CloudResearch, an online platform offering a diverse participant pool. These experiments were designed to investigate whether venting could indeed influence listeners to prefer and support the venter over the person being vented about.
In the first three experiments, the researchers used vignettes to create controlled scenarios in which participants took on the role of listeners hearing a mutual friend (the speaker) vent about another mutual friend (the target). Experiments 1 and 2 exclusively used female participants, based on research suggesting that venting might be more common or apparent among women. In Experiment 3, both male and female participants were included to test for potential gender differences in how venting is perceived.
Participants were randomly assigned to read one of several vignettes. In the venting condition, the speaker expressed frustration and hurt feelings about the target’s behavior, such as canceling dinner plans at the last minute. The key to the venting condition was that the speaker’s expression of frustration was emotional but not overtly hostile. By contrast, participants in the derogation condition read about the same situation, but the speaker’s reaction was far more aggressive, involving insults and harsh language directed at the target.
In some experiments, additional conditions were included for comparison: neutral gossip, in which the speaker shared non-controversial information about the target (e.g., what the target had been watching on Netflix), and venting about non-social problems, such as car troubles, to see if venting about a non-human subject had the same effects on listener perceptions.
After reading the vignettes, participants were asked to rate their feelings of closeness and liking toward both the speaker and the target on a sliding scale. The researchers aggregated these ratings to measure what they called “alliance feelings,” which reflect how much the listener likes and feels close to both the speaker and the target. In Experiments 2 and 3, additional exploratory questions were asked to examine other feelings like pity and sympathy, and whether the speaker was perceived as a victim of the target’s behavior.
In all three experiments, participants who read vignettes in which the speaker vented reported feeling closer to and liking the speaker more than the target. This effect was unique to venting; when the speaker used overtly derogatory language to criticize the target, listeners did not report liking the speaker more. In fact, derogation often backfired, leading to reduced feelings of closeness toward the speaker, suggesting that overt negativity harmed the speaker’s reputation.
Interestingly, in Experiments 2 and 3, when venters aired grievances about personal troubles, they were rated similarly to those who engaged in neutral gossip, suggesting that the positive effects of venting are tied to the emotional expression of frustration rather than the specific content. In other words, listeners seemed to appreciate the emotional vulnerability displayed in venting
Experiment 4 was designed to address potential confounds in the earlier experiments. The researchers wanted to ensure that the findings from the venting and derogation conditions weren’t due to superficial differences in how the vignettes were written, such as the use of insults or specific phrases.
In the fourth experiment, the content of the vignettes was carefully controlled. The derogation vignette no longer included harsh language like insults, and both the venting and derogation conditions involved the speaker expressing frustration about the same issue in nearly identical wording. The key difference was that in the venting condition, the speaker expressed their feelings in a more emotionally vulnerable way, while the derogation condition involved the speaker communicating with a more overtly negative tone.
As in the earlier experiments, participants were asked to rate their feelings of closeness and liking toward both the speaker and the target after reading the vignettes. In this experiment, the researchers also included questions to explore whether the participants viewed the speaker as a victim, to assess whether venting’s effectiveness might be driven by perceptions of victimhood. These victimhood questions served as potential covariates to determine whether venting’s social effects were influenced by the listener viewing the venter as more of a victim than the derogator.
Even with this more controlled setup, the findings were consistent with the earlier experiments. Listeners still reported liking and feeling closer to the speaker in the venting condition compared to the derogation condition.
In addition, venters were more likely to be seen as victims of the target’s actions compared to those who derogated the target. However, even after controlling for perceptions of victimhood, venting still led to more favorable feelings toward the speaker. This suggests that while listeners might sympathize with venters, the key factor driving the positive effects of venting is not just that the speaker is seen as a victim,
In Experiment 5, the researchers introduced a new behavioral measure to test how venting affected participants’ actions, not just their feelings. After reading the vignettes, participants took part in a modified version of the Dictator Game. This is a classic economic game used to measure how people allocate resources between themselves and others. In this version, participants were told they had 10 lottery tickets, which could give the holder a chance to win a new car. Participants had to divide these tickets between the speaker and the target, meaning they had to choose how many benefits to allocate to each person.
The findings revealed that participants gave more tickets to the speaker when they vented about the target compared to when they derogated them. This suggests that venting not only increases how much listeners like the speaker but also leads to more tangible benefits, as listeners are more willing to allocate resources to a venting speaker than to a derogatory one.
In the final experiment, Experiment 6, the researchers wanted to test whether venting would still be effective if the speaker was seen as having a personal rivalry with the target. This experiment built on the previous ones by introducing a new vignette in which the speaker was implied to have a romantic interest in someone the target had recently started dating. This added a layer of implied competition between the speaker and the target, testing whether listeners would still prefer the speaker over the target when the speaker’s motivations for venting were less neutral and more self-serving.
The results showed that when rivalry was implied, the positive effects of venting disappeared. Listeners no longer preferred the speaker over the target, and venting was no more effective than derogation in influencing how much listeners liked the speaker.
This finding suggests that venting is only effective when it is perceived as a genuine expression of frustration, rather than as a manipulative or aggressive tactic. When listeners believe that the speaker is venting out of jealousy or personal rivalry, they are less likely to view the speaker favorably. This highlights the delicate balance involved in social venting: it can improve relationships when done in a way that appears sincere and non-aggressive, but it loses its effectiveness if listeners suspect ulterior motives.
“When people vent, we might say that it’s about getting frustrations off our chests — and on some level, it is,” Krems told PsyPost. “But on another level, under certain parameters, this very same behavior can cause the friends we vent to to like us better and support us more than the mutual friends we vent about.
“By showing that venting among friends can help venters capture more of their friends’ relative affections, we’ve provided perhaps the first viable alternative hypothesis from the predominant, popular, and importantly wrong Freudian account for why people vent.”
As with all research, there are limitations to consider. The experiments relied on hypothetical scenarios, which may not fully capture the complexity of real-world social dynamics. Participants were also drawn from an online platform, which might not represent the full range of social contexts in which venting occurs. “We lack good naturalistic data at the moment; these were tightly-controlled lab experiments,” Krems noted.
An area for future research could involve examining how people choose what to vent about and to whom. The current study suggests that venting is effective because it avoids being seen as aggressive, but it remains unclear whether people are consciously strategic about this. Do they intentionally avoid harsher criticism to maintain their likability, or is this behavior more automatic? Exploring the motivations behind venting could offer a deeper understanding of its role in social competition.
“People vent about all sorts of topics to a range of people; questions remain about the efficacy of venting across different audiences, about different topics, and so on,” Krems said.
Despite the limitations, the research challenges the traditional view that venting is simply a way to relieve frustration. Instead, it suggests that venting plays a strategic role in social dynamics.
“This adds to work on how people try to make better friendships,” Krems explained. “We have friends who are closer and less close. How do we get closer to our friends? Well, one reason that we might not like to talk about a lot is by competing with our friends’ other friends for affection, time spent together, and so on. (We so readily acknowledge this when it comes to attracting and getting closer to romantic partners, but we seem to eschew the idea when it comes to attracting and getting closer to friends.)”
The study, “Venting makes people prefer—and preferentially support—us over those we vent about,” was authored by Jaimie Arona Krems, Laureon A. Merrie, Nina N. Rodriguez, and Keelah E.G. Williams.
