The instinct to hide a flaw, especially in front of people whose opinion matters, feels like basic self-protection. Two studies looking at real workplace and interpersonal dynamics suggest that instinct often works against people, and that the honest, riskier move tends to land better than expected.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2022 study by Lily Jiang, Leslie John, Reihane Boghrati, and Maryam Kouchaki, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Across several experiments, the researchers had working professionals evaluate managers who either disclosed a personal weakness, such as a fear of public speaking or a tendency toward chronic lateness, or didn’t. In one study, 298 professionals rated fictitious managers based on written profiles. In another, 400 professionals were paired into live text-based conversations playing the roles of manager and employee. Managers who voluntarily disclosed a weakness were consistently rated as more authentic, with employees reporting more willingness to keep working with them, and critically, this boost in authenticity came with no measurable loss in how competent or warm the manager was seen as. The effect held for both male and female managers and replicated when researchers tested it using a real video message from a Google executive. One important condition mattered: the disclosure had to seem voluntary, not forced or extracted, for it to build authenticity rather than undercut it.
A second study helps explain why this works, by revealing a systematic gap between how people judge their own vulnerable moments versus how others actually judge them. In a 2018 study by Anna Bruk, Sabine Scholl, and Herbert Bless, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the researchers ran seven separate experiments using both imagined scenarios, like confessing a mistake or admitting romantic feelings, and a real, unrehearsed task, having participants sing in front of an evaluating “jury.” Across the board, people consistently rated their own acts of vulnerability far more harshly than outside observers did watching the same moments. The researchers traced this gap to a difference in how people mentally process the same event: people tend to focus on the concrete, embarrassing details of their own vulnerable moment, while observers process the same moment more abstractly, in ways that read as courage rather than weakness.
Together, these two studies suggest that the fear of exposing a flaw is often based on a miscalibrated prediction, not an accurate one. Jiang and colleagues’ research shows that disclosing a real weakness in a professional setting doesn’t just fail to backfire, it actively builds authenticity and trust without costing competence or warmth. Bruk and colleagues’ research helps explain the mechanism behind why this works: the person disclosing a flaw is stuck evaluating it up close and in painful detail, while everyone else watching sees something closer to honesty and nerve. The gap between how bad it feels internally and how it actually lands externally appears to be the real obstacle, more than the flaw itself.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Jiang and colleagues’ research specifically found that the disclosure needed to appear voluntary to build authenticity, meaning a weakness that comes out under pressure, gets exposed by someone else, or seems calculated for sympathy likely doesn’t carry the same benefit, and the studies focused specifically on workplace manager-employee dynamics rather than every kind of relationship. Bruk and colleagues’ research documents a consistent perception gap across imagined and real scenarios, but it measured how vulnerability was rated in fairly contained, one-time moments, not how repeated or very serious disclosures of flaws might be received over time.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely useful correction to the instinct to hide what feels like a weakness. Both studies point toward the same conclusion from different angles: the flaw itself is rarely the problem, the person’s own harsh internal read of it usually is, and in real professional and interpersonal settings, being upfront about it tends to build more trust and connection than staying carefully polished ever does.
