A new study finds that microaggressions aimed at Black women online appear to harm the health of other Black women who see those microaggressions—even though the microaggressions are not aimed at them personally. Specifically, researchers found that encountering vicarious microaggressions was associated with worse sleep quality for young Black women.

The paper, “Online and Offline Gendered Racial Microaggressions and Sleep Quality for Black Women,” is published the journal Health Psychology.

“A lot of people falsely treat microaggressions as a kind of joke, but they are serious and have serious consequences,” says Vanessa Volpe, first author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of psychology at North Carolina State University.

Microaggressions are often subtle instances of mistreatment or insulting behavior that usually revolve around negative stereotypes. But while microaggressions are often subtle, they also accrue over time.

“And because people—including Black women—often face a consistent stream of these microaggressions, there’s a tremendous amount of evidence showing that these microaggressions can have a serious impact on people’s health and well-being,” Volpe says.

“We launched this study to learn more about the extent to which Black women encounter microaggressions online and offline, as well as how these microaggressions may relate to sleep quality. We focused on sleep quality because it is a health outcome in itself—and is also well-established as a behavior that can be affected by stress.”

For this study, researchers recruited 478 Black women between the ages of 18 and 35 who live in the United States. Study participants completed a detailed survey designed to capture how often they experienced microaggressions related to their race and gender both via in-person interactions and online.

For online microaggressions, the survey distinguished between microaggressions aimed at the study participant and vicarious microaggressions, in which the study participant observed microaggressions that weren’t aimed specifically at them. The survey also included a range of questions focused on understanding each study participant’s sleep quality.

Online microaggressions directed at the study participant were the least commonly reported, which researchers believe may be related to the ability of social media users to curate their online experience—choosing which accounts to follow, blocking accounts they don’t want to see, and so on.

“To be clear, the Black women in our study still experienced direct online microaggressions, they just experienced these microaggressions less frequently than other microaggressions,” Volpe says.

In-person microaggressions were the second-most common, with vicarious online microaggressions being by far the most commonly experienced.

In-person microaggressions were associated with lower sleep quality scores, but only the vicarious online microaggressions were uniquely associated with greater likelihood of clinically-relevant poor sleep quality.

“Study participants were asked how frequently they were exposed to vicarious online microaggressions, and they answered on a 0–5 scale,” Volpe explains. “We found that for each unit you go up on that 0–5 scale, the likelihood of clinically-relevant poor sleep quality goes up by 33%.

“The fact that vicarious online microaggressions can adversely impact Black women seems particularly relevant in this election year, with the first Black woman serving as the presidential nominee of a major political party.”

The findings have ramifications for both health practitioners and researchers.

“One takeaway message is that health professionals who are working with people experiencing sleep problems need to ask about stress experiences that may be specific to sex and race—including stress related to their online experiences,” Volpe says. “They should work with their patients to find stress management plans and solutions that take these unique experiences and their patients’ online engagement into consideration.

“What’s more, it’s a little surprising that vicarious microaggressions seem to have a bigger impact on sleep quality than in-person microaggressions that are aimed directly at you. That suggests that the research community needs to take a closer look at vicarious microaggressions.”

The paper was co-authored by Abbey Collins, a Ph.D. student at NC State; Eric Zhou of Harvard Medical School; Donte Bernard, of the University of Missouri; and Naila Smith of the University of Virginia.