Why We Hide Good News and Share Bad News

Based on research by Emily Prinsloo (Rice Business), Irene Scopelliti (University of London), George Loewenstein (Carnegie Mellon), and Joachim Vosgerau (Bocconi University)

Key takeaways: 

• When responding to someone else’s news, we often choose whether to share or hide our own recent success or failure based on how it could potentially make the other person feel. 
• One reason people disclose failure so readily is that a shared setback can make someone feel less alone. 
• People are much more hesitant to introduce their own success after someone else has failed, and when they do, they often soften the news with apology, reassurance or delay.

Picture this: You’ve just received good news at work — a major sale or a glowing review. Eager to share it, you track down a colleague. But as you approach them, ready to celebrate, you pause. They look upset. You ask what happened, and they tell you they’ve just been passed over for a coveted promotion.

Do you still share your win, or keep it to yourself?

Now imagine the reverse: You just lost a major client, and your colleague says they blew an important pitch. Do you share your own failure in commiseration?

Traditional workplace wisdom suggests that people share success to build status and manage impressions. But a new paper co-authored by Emily Prinsloo, assistant professor of marketing at Rice Business, suggests that in everyday conversations, what we disclose often has less to do with ego than with protecting other people’s feelings. This suggests that even ordinary workplace conversations can be shaped by prosocial motives, not just self-presentation.

Why outcome disclosures are about more than who goes first

Sharing a success or setback with someone is not a one-way process. It’s interactive. One person shares first, and the other must decide whether to respond with an outcome of their own.

To understand the unwritten rules of these moments, Prinsloo and her co-authors looked beyond why people initiate disclosure and focused instead on what they call “responsive disclosures”: the split-second decisions we make about whether to reveal a success or setback after someone else has already shared theirs.

“Most research focuses on the person who initially shares an outcome,” Prinsloo says. “But shifting focus to the responder is fascinating because the choice to share or hide our own stories offers a particularly meaningful context for understanding how people manage emotions and relationships through everyday communication.”

Why we share failure more readily than success

To see how these decisions play out, the researchers analyzed nine studies involving more than 8,200 participants across health, career and financial scenarios, including live conversations between strangers.

Across the board, people tended to follow a basic rule of reciprocity, matching what others shared — answering success with success and failure with failure.

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But the data revealed a striking asymmetry. People were more willing to respond to an outcome disclosure with a matching failure than a matching success. When someone reveals a setback, we often share our own to signal solidarity and make that person feel less alone. (One caveat: the setback you share should be in the same area of life. A health story won’t resonate much when someone’s dealing with a money problem.)

Unlike sharing a matching story of disappointment, people expected little emotional benefit from sharing a matching story of success. Likewise, sharing a failure right after someone else’s win was seen as dampening their celebration or shifting attention away from it. The research shows that most people instinctively hold those unrelated stories back to protect the initiator’s feelings. 

Why people soften or hide success to protect others

So, what happens in the scenario at the beginning of this article: when you have good news and the other person has bad? The researchers find that people are far more willing to admit a failure to a successful colleague than to announce a success to one who had failed. That restraint is highly prosocial. 

And disclosure is not just a choice between speaking and staying quiet. It’s also a matter of framing, tone, and timing based on how they anticipate it will be received. 

To see this in action, one of the studies asked participants to imagine running into an acquaintance at the airport. The participants imagined having received a prestigious job offer, but their acquaintance shares they’d just been rejected for a job. Many participants soften the blow of disclosing their success by writing longer responses, downplaying the offer or attributing it to luck. More than a quarter even misrepresented or concealed their success to spare the other person’s feelings.

Do these protective responses actually help?

Prinsloo, et al. note that good intentions don’t necessarily mean these strategies achieve their aims. Concealing a success could backfire if the other person feels patronized, and sharing a matching failure could be heard as competitive instead of comforting (i.e., “this is about me, not you”). 

Cultural norms may also shape when these patterns appear. But generally speaking, the findings reveal that our responsive disclosures are motivated by empathy for others. It’s a key conversational tool we use every day to preserve harmony and support our peers.

“The next step is understanding when these conversational choices are actually seen as supportive, and when they instead create awkwardness or friction,” Prinsloo says. “Future research can clarify not just why people choose to share or hide their outcomes, but whether those strategies achieve their goals.”

Written by Scott Pett

Prinsloo, et al (2026). “Responses to Outcome Disclosure: People Asymmetrically Disclose or Hide Their Outcomes to Protect Others’ Emotions,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.