Tears might tug at our heartstrings, but can we always trust their apparent honest vulnerability?
A sweeping new study spanning multiple countries – and more than 10,000 participants – has found that the sincerity of emotional tears depends a lot more on context than we first thought.
Appearing in PLOS ONE, the paper drafted by a team of Dutch and Polish researchers wanted to answer what seemed like (at first) a couple of simple questions: When do people perceive tears as signs of genuine emotion? And when do they see them as crocodile tears?
The short answer? It depends.
Mitigating factors include who’s crying, why they’re crying, and the facial features on display. And the observer’s own point of view plays a part, too. Across three studies, the team explored how perceptions of honesty shift when a person is crying, and how these impressions are filtered through the lens of facial appearance, situational context, and the observer’s own personality.
Crying’s Mixed Messages
People have long seen tears as involuntary. As a result, we tend to trust the apparent emotional state of someone we see crying. And unlike more performative cues, tears are notoriously hard to fake, which helps explain their ability to quickly evoke sympathy. But they’re also an effective way to manipulate someone.
To help clear up these conflicting interpretations, the researchers started by reanalyzing data from the Cross-Cultural Tears (CCT) project, which included responses from more than 7,000 individuals worldwide.
Participants rated tearful and non-tearful faces based on their perceived honesty. Overall, participants rated tearful individuals as more honest – especially in emotionally charged situations. But those ratings varied widely by country, target gender, and situational appropriateness.
Warm Faces, Cold Receptions?
This paper draws on two primary experiments that included participants from Poland, Norway, South Africa, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In each of those, participants evaluated digitally manipulated portraits of random people – some with tears, some without – who’d been placed in either manipulative or neutral vignettes.
The researchers also varied the facial warmth of the photo subjects in a bid to make some of them look more trustworthy.
Notably, tears improved the perception of honesty more for faces that looked colder or less warm. The researchers theorized that could be due, in part, because observers subconsciously thought those individuals had more to prove. For faces that already looked warm and trustworthy, tears actually undercut one’s perceived honesty.
Manipulative scenarios, such as trying to cut in a medical line or persuade a partner to do something – also dampened the honesty boost of tears across the board. And while both male and female targets cried, men’s tears were more likely to boost perceived honesty and support intentions.
The study participants were more likely to view female criers as manipulative, especially in emotionally charged or strategic situations.
Personality Matters
The observer’s own disposition also figured in the equation. People scoring high on psychopathy or Machiavellianism (two traits from the “Dark Triad) were less likely to interpret tears as honest.
In other words, individuals prone to distrust or manipulation themselves were less likely to trust someone else’s tears, too.
Meanwhile, perceived authenticity and manipulativeness mediated the effects of tears on honesty. If a crying individual seemed authentic and less manipulative, participants deemed those to be more honest and more in need of support.
Cultural Nuances, Subtle Biases
While the researchers didn’t test specific cultural hypotheses, the global scope of their study revealed variations across countries, especially around baseline trust levels and gender expectations.
For example, people in Norway – one of the highest-trust countries in the sample – responded more positively to tears than participants in South Africa, where baseline trust levels are lower.
Despite these nuances, the authors stress that most effects, while statistically significant, were small in size – suggesting that people’s snap judgments about crying are malleable, often unconscious, and deserve further exploration.
Emotional tears might nudge our perception of honesty, but they don’t guarantee it. We decode them through layers of context, bias, and belief. Even if we don’t realize it.
