“I see a therapist and this is usually the time I go each week.” This was one of the disclosures used in a study by Kerry Roberts Gibson, Dana Harari and Jennifer Carson Marr. They published it in 2018 in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Across three lab experiments with 762 participants, higher-status people who disclosed a weakness suffered what the researchers called a “status penalty.”
Peers who disclosed the same kind of weakness did not pay this price. The University of Maryland’s business school summarized the research under the headline “Avoid Oversharing at Work.”