Toronto - Researchers Rachel Ruttan and Katherine DeCelles of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management are anything but neutral on neutrality. The next time you're tempted to play it safe on a hot-button topic, their evidence-based advice is to consider saying what you really think.
That's because their recent research, based on more than a dozen experiments with thousands of participants, reveals that people take a dim view of others' professed neutrality on controversial issues, rating them just as morally suspect as those expressing an opposing viewpoint, if not worse.
"Neutrality gives you no advantage over opposition," says Prof. Ruttan, an associate professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management with an interest in moral judgment and prosocial behaviour. "You're not pleasing anyone."
That finding was consistent whether research participants were asked to imagine themselves in a social media context or at a family holiday dinner, on issues from immigration to cannabis legalization. It didn't matter if the neutral individual was a politician, a work colleague or a family member. Participants still viewed that person as less moral than one whose opinion matched their own.
Yet it was a different story when the tables were turned. Participants overwhelmingly opted to be publicly neutral when faced with a controversial issue themselves. When asked what opinion they would express in an informal workplace conversation about affirmative action, 59% said they would be neutral, despite only 23% privately holding that view. Even those paid for good advice repeated the pattern. A sub-study of about 100 public relations professionals found most would tell a public-facing client to be neutral on safe injection sites if asked their position in a media interview.
That double standard -- where neutrality is okay for me, but not for you -- may have to do with something called the actor-observer gap, says Prof. Ruttan. "When I'm being neutral, I know exactly what's going on in my head — maybe I'm genuinely torn, maybe I'm trying to keep the peace at a family dinner," she says. "But when you observe me being neutral, you don't have access to all that. You have to infer my 'true' thoughts, and that's where the cynicism creeps in."
Neutrality has been studied many times before, but Prof. Ruttan and Prof. DeCelles, who also studies morality, along with Gabrielle Adams of the University of Virginia, decided to look more closely at how people use neutrality as a social strategy after noticing political chatter becoming more common in workplace and family conversations. They also saw how a corporation like Disney took a PR pummelling after its (now former) CEO, Bob Chapek, initially chose to stay neutral about Florida's controversial Parental Rights in Education Act which critics named the "Don't Say Gay" bill.
Opting out completely from a contentious conversation could be a socially successful strategy — research participants rated it morally on par with a likeminded opinion. But doing so may only be appropriate in certain situations such as the workplace.
"Context definitely matters," says Prof. Ruttan. "At a family dinner, maybe it's more about finding common ground on values rather than specific policies. And sometimes speaking your mind with courage might be the answer, even if it's uncomfortable."
The study appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General .
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