How citizens behave toward public sector workers is crucial for the well-being and performance of workers. Scholars have mainly focused on understanding negative citizen behaviors, such as aggression. We study a positive behavior, namely compassionate behavior. We study real compassionate behavior in the form of writing positive encouragement messages that are distributed to social workers in the field. We test if showing difficulties faced by public sector workers results in citizens writing more encouragement messages. We also test if bureaucrat bashing results in less encouragement messages. Using a preregistered experiment among a representative sample of Canadian citizens (n = 1,264), we find that showing public sector workers' struggles and imperfections makes citizens almost twice as likely to write an encouragement message. Hence, showing your weakness can be a strength. Bureaucrat bashing, however, has no effect. Results show that citizens can be stimulated to act more positively toward public sector workers.

中文翻译：

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同情，官僚抨击和公共行政

公民对待公共部门工作人员的方式对工作人员的福祉和绩效至关重要。学者们主要关注于理解消极的公民行为，例如攻击性。我们研究一种积极的行为，即富有同情心的行为。我们以撰写积极鼓励信息的形式研究真正富有同情心的行为，这些信息分发给该领域的社会工作者。我们测试显示公共部门工作人员面临的困难是否会导致公民写下更多鼓励信息。我们还测试了官僚抨击是否会导致更少的鼓励信息。在加拿大公民的代表性样本（n = 1,264）中使用预先注册的实验，我们发现显示公共部门工人的斗争和不完美使公民写鼓励信息的可能性几乎增加一倍。因此，展示你的弱点可能是一种力量。然而，官僚抨击没有效果。结果表明，可以激发公民对公共部门工人采取更积极的行动。