If you don’t have anything nice to say, perhaps it’s OK to say it anyway – if responding to someone who has treated you or your team rudely, new Cornell research suggests.

Civil responses to disrespectful behavior remain the best option. But in a variety of contexts – from hockey fights to the workplace – experiments showed that people view an uncivil action or comment more leniently when performed as retaliation rather than instigation. Retaliating in kind to incivility may be appreciated as much as neutral responses.

The findings don’t condone bad behavior, the researchers said, but highlight context-based complexity largely missing from research to date that has denounced any incivility as problematic.

“People prefer retaliatory incivility to an instigator’s incivility, seeing it as more right, just and moral,” said Merrick Osborne, assistant professor of organizational behavior in the ILR School. “Although the degree of incivility is the same, we theorize that, in retaliation, it’s seen as helping to protect a group’s norms and establish to the instigator that they did something wrong.”

Osborne is the first author of “Two Wrongs is What Makes it More Right: How Retaliatory Incivility Receives Social Leniency,” published March 17 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Co-authors, all from the University of Southern California, are Morteza Dehghani, professor of psychology and computer science; doctoral candidates Suhaib Abdurahman, Ali Omrani and Jackson Trager.

Research on incivility has found that it activates a cycle in which targets tend to retaliate, behavior celebrated in popular slang such as “clapping back” or “reading for filth.” But Osborne said scholarship has focused on the cycle’s initiation and its consequences – disrupting morale and productivity – and overlooked how incivility might be perceived differently at later stages. The new research delved into that subject in five experiments involving nearly 850 participants.

A first study asked Reddit users to imagine someone in a subreddit they frequented making a rude or insulting comment, or responding to such a comment with a similarly uncivil one. Study participants rated retaliatory posters as significantly more worthy of status (“I admire them more”) and were more than seven times more likely to “upvote” an uncivil comment made in retaliation, boosting retaliators’ “karma,” in Reddit terms.

The next two studies investigated sports contexts in which retaliation risked backfiring by improving an opponent’s circumstances. Hockey fans rated members of their favorite team as more virtuous if they punched an opposing player who had committed a violent penalty, compared to if they started a fight unprovoked. Similarly, baseball fans supported their team’s pitcher beaning an opposing batter (causing no serious injury) more after their star hitter had been hit by a pitch than in isolation. Observers viewed the retaliatory acts as more justified and admirable even though they would incur sanctions benefiting the other team – leaving the hockey team shorthanded or putting an opposing batter on base.

“On the ice or the baseball diamond, retaliatory incivility seems to send a signal about what you and your team value and will accept,” Osborne said. “A similar mindset may apply outside the sports world: We want ourselves and our group to be safe and to cohere, and so if somebody wrongs the group, we may reward groupmates who shut that down.”

A fourth study showed incivility was only rewarded when it responded directly to an instigator, not when “disseminated” – that is, if a person’s rudeness prompted you to “take it out” on a third party. Finally, the researchers examined an email exchange between business team members, including one who criticizes a coworker’s report as “stupid” and containing “dumb errors.” Study participants rated a civil response – “Please don’t say that. That’s not OK.” – most positively. But an uncivil reply (“Shut up, no one wants to hear what you have to say.”) was no more frowned upon than a neutral reply (“Keep me updated.”).

“There’s more social value in being civil, but there can be social value in acting uncivilly, provided that it’s retaliatory,” Osborne said.

Together the studies suggest that evaluations of incivility depend on the events that precede it, such that uncivil behavior is held to a lower standard when responding to aggression that violates expectations.

“When you retaliate uncivilly, you’re being compared to the person who initially acted uncivilly,” Osborne said. “Their incivility almost gives you license to match their energy. So if that’s what your heart is calling you to do, you can answer the call.”

The research received support from the Negotiation and Team Resources Institute.