Two Wrongs Is What Makes It More Right: How Retaliatory Incivility Receives Social Leniency

Incivility is largely denounced; yet, our focus on its ills has inhibited our ability to determine when incivility could garner rewards. We propose that retaliatory incivility – i.e., incivility in response to someone else’s incivility — is seen as more virtuous than instigatory incivility, and consequently generates more social rewards for actors. To test these hypotheses, we used observational data from Reddit (2,252,607 comments) to compare how many social rewards users were granted when they responded uncivilly to civil or uncivil posts from other users. We then experimentally confirm our hypotheses in a sample of Reddit users, as well as five samples of participants from different contexts of group incivility; hockey fans, baseball fans, employees, workplace teams. Together, our findings challenge conventional wisdom: retaliatory incivility can be a surprising path to social rewards. Thus, as incivility rises internationally, our findings have far-reaching theoretical and practical implications.