Imagine spending the workday being humiliated by your boss. A manager mocks you in front of colleagues, takes credit for your work, unfairly blames you or repeatedly treats you with contempt. You leave the office angry, but there is an obvious problem: you cannot simply retaliate against the person who controls your performance review or career prospects. So what happens to that anger when there is nowhere safe to put it?
In 2018, researchers came up with an unusually creative way to investigate the question. Instead of allowing employees to confront their real supervisors, they gave participants a voodoo doll representing an abusive boss. Participants could symbolically retaliate against the doll, while researchers examined whether the act changed how they felt about the mistreatment.
The bizarre experiment eventually won the 2018 Ig Nobel Prize in Economics, but behind the miniature boss and pins was a serious question about workplace psychology: why does being mistreated create such a strong desire for revenge, and can symbolic retaliation make people feel that justice has been restored?
Why abusive bosses can make employees want revenge
Workplace mistreatment is more than simply having a difficult manager. Psychologists use the term abusive supervision to describe employees' perceptions of sustained hostile verbal and non-verbal behavior from supervisors, excluding physical contact.
It can involve ridicule, humiliation, disrespect, unfair treatment or deliberately undermining an employee. The problem is that supervisors usually have more power. An employee may want to fight back but fear losing a job, damaging a career or making the situation worse.
That creates an imbalance: someone has caused harm, the employee believes the treatment was wrong, but there may be no safe or practical way to respond.
The researchers behind the voodoo-doll study wanted to understand what happens when that desire for retaliation remains unresolved.
Researchers gave employees a symbolic target
The study, “Righting a Wrong: Retaliation on a Voodoo Doll Symbolizing an Abusive Supervisor Restores Justice,” was published in The Leadership Quarterly in February 2018.
The researchers were Lindie Hanyu Liang, Douglas J. Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, D. Lance Ferris and Lisa M. Keeping.
Their central idea was that retaliation might serve a psychological function beyond simply hurting the person responsible for the wrongdoing. Perhaps it could make victims feel that an imbalance had been corrected. But researchers obviously could not allow employees to attack their actual bosses. So they used a symbolic substitute.
Participants were shown a voodoo doll representing their supervisor and were given opportunities to retaliate against it using actions, including sticking pins into the doll. There was no supernatural claim involved; the doll was simply a controlled psychological stand-in for the abusive supervisor.
The researchers wanted to know what the symbolic act did to the employee's perception of justice.
What happened when employees could retaliate
In the first study, the researchers recruited 229 full-time employees in the United States and Canada who had experience working with a supervisor. After exclusions, 195 participants remained.
Participants were placed into experimental conditions involving abusive supervision and opportunities for symbolic retaliation. Researchers then measured their psychological responses and perceptions of justice.
The results were striking. Participants who recalled abusive treatment but were not given an opportunity to retaliate showed higher implicit perceptions of injustice than those who were allowed to symbolically retaliate.
In other words, when employees felt wronged and could do nothing about it, the sense that something unfair had happened remained stronger. Giving them a symbolic opportunity to retaliate appeared to reduce that lingering sense of injustice.
The participants had not actually changed their supervisors' behavior. The original workplace events had not been undone. Yet symbolically striking back appeared to help restore a feeling of psychological balance.
The second experiment strengthened the finding
The researchers conducted a second study to replicate and extend the initial findings. Again, the results supported the basic idea that symbolic retaliation could alleviate the sense of injustice associated with abusive supervision.
The researchers proposed that retaliation may therefore have a function that is easy to overlook. It is usually regarded as a destructive response that can escalate workplace conflict. But under certain circumstances, the desire to retaliate may also reflect an attempt to restore justice after being wronged.
That does not mean revenge is generally beneficial or that employees should retaliate against abusive managers. The finding was much narrower: the perception of having retaliated may satisfy part of the psychological desire for justice.
Why the study won an Ig Nobel Prize
In September 2018, Liang, Brown, Lian, Hanig, Ferris and Keeping received the Ig Nobel Economics Prize for investigating whether employees could use voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses.
The Ig Nobel Prizes, organized by Annals of Improbable Research , celebrate unusual research that is intended to make people laugh and then think. This study fits that description almost perfectly.
An employee stabbing a voodoo doll of a boss sounds absurd. But the underlying issue is real. Workplace abuse can affect employees, while retaliation can create further conflict and consequences.
Understanding why people want revenge may therefore help explain behavior that otherwise looks irrational or self-defeating.
What the voodoo-doll experiment really tells us
The strange experiment ultimately reveals something remarkably ordinary about human behavior. When people believe they have been treated unfairly, they often want more than the harmful behavior to stop. They want the situation to feel balanced again.
Sometimes that means demanding an apology, reporting misconduct or confronting the person responsible. In this experiment, it meant sticking pins into a doll representing an abusive boss.
The doll did not punish the manager. It did not change the workplace or erase the original mistreatment. But symbolic retaliation appeared to reduce participants' sense that the injustice remained unanswered.
