Most advice about dealing with a difficult or toxic person eventually lands on one of two strategies: say something, or steer clear. A 2024 study put both to a real test and found that neither one reliably does what people most want it to do, which is make the bad behavior stop.
Researchers Yin Yan, Kaichen Zhao, and colleagues tracked 219 employees across China in a three-wave diary study published in Current Psychology, following people over time as they experienced and responded to workplace incivility, rudeness, dismissiveness, and disrespect that falls short of outright harassment or abuse. Some employees responded by confronting the person directly, others by avoiding them, and the researchers tracked whether either approach reduced how often the same kind of treatment happened again. Neither one did, reliably. Confrontation didn’t reduce the incivility’s recurrence. Avoidance didn’t either, and avoidance came with an added cost: it was linked to greater emotional exhaustion in the person doing the avoiding, and, in something of an ironic twist, to that same person being more likely to act uncivilly toward others afterward. Confrontation did have one clear upside despite not stopping the behavior: people who confronted the source of incivility reported more psychological forgiveness and, over time, a somewhat better relationship with that person than people who avoided them.
That finding lines up with earlier research on the same topic. A foundational 2017 study by M. Sandy Hershcovis and colleagues, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, examined confrontation and avoidance coping in response to workplace incivility and reached a similar conclusion: these common strategies don’t reliably fix the underlying problem of a difficult person’s behavior. Across both studies, the honest picture is less satisfying than most advice on the topic suggests. There’s no confrontation script and no amount of distance that comes with strong evidence of actually changing how a toxic or difficult person treats others going forward.
Given that, the more useful question might not be how to stop someone else’s behavior, which the research suggests is often outside a person’s control, but how to protect your own wellbeing while dealing with it. This is where a much larger, older body of research on emotion regulation offers something more solid to work with. In a foundational 2003 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologists James Gross and Oliver John ran five separate studies comparing two ways people manage difficult emotional moments: reappraisal, actively changing how you think about a frustrating situation to make it feel less charged, and suppression, simply bottling up the reaction and not showing it. The results were consistent across all five studies. People who habitually used reappraisal experienced more positive emotion and less negative emotion overall, reported better relationships with the people around them, and scored higher on measures of general well-being. People who leaned on suppression showed the opposite pattern on every measure: less positive emotion, more negative emotion, worse relationship functioning, and lower well-being.
Put together, the two bodies of research point toward a division worth taking seriously. What a person does outwardly toward a difficult coworker or acquaintance, confronting them or steering clear, doesn’t have strong evidence behind it as a way to actually change that person’s future behavior. What seems to matter more, at least for the target’s own outcomes, is happening somewhere less visible: how the person privately makes sense of the interaction afterward. Someone who reframes a colleague’s rudeness as more about that colleague’s own stress or limitations, rather than replaying it and swallowing the frustration, appears to come out of the same difficult interaction in noticeably better shape.
It’s worth being clear-eyed about what this research doesn’t cover. Both bodies of work focus on ordinary workplace friction and rudeness, not abuse, harassment, or situations involving real safety concerns, where the calculus around confrontation and distance changes considerably and often requires a formal process rather than an individual coping strategy. And correlational data on emotion regulation habits can’t fully rule out that people already prone to better relationships and well-being simply find reappraisal easier to do in the first place, rather than reappraisal single-handedly producing those outcomes.
What the research does offer is a more modest, more honest starting point than most advice about toxic people provides. Changing a difficult person is often not within reach through either confrontation or distance. Changing how the interaction sits in your own head afterward, according to a genuinely large and consistent body of evidence, is.