Politeness has dark side in awkward social situations: Studies

You know that jerk at the party who keeps telling off-colour jokes? Or the co-worker whose political opinions are ugly as they are constantly shared? New research shows it’s not just because they delude themselves into thinking listeners are receptive but also because listeners, compelled to be polite, really do come across that way.

In three studies using hundreds of participants, psychologists find etiquette overrides disagreement in casual conversation, with people consistently withholding negative feedback due to social norms.

“It suggests this isn’t just a matter of people believing what they want to believe; it suggests that listeners aren’t offering truthful information about how they feel,” says study author Joyce Ehrlinger, assistant professor of psychology at Florida State University.

The findings bear out in three experiments, the first of which asked strangers to tell jokes to one another and later answer questions about the interaction. Researchers found people responded to bad punchlines with “polite, disingenuous laughter,” and that this positive feedback led joke-tellers to overestimate how funny they’d been.

A second experiment paired strangers with opposing views on a controversial issue and asked one to persuade the other to his or her side. Speakers’ overconfidence regarding their success in the interaction was linked to partner reports of feeling pressure to be gracious and hide true feelings.

A final experiment asked people to create online profiles that were later evaluated on camera by a stranger. The strangers were put into two groups: the first told (falsely) that the other person wouldn’t see their evaluation, thus removing the politeness imperative, and the second told that they would see it.

Video evaluations made by the first group (social norms removed) ultimately left the profile-creators with a fairly accurate notion of how they were assessed. Feedback from the second group (social norms), by contrast, saw profile creators overestimate the positive impression they made on the evaluators.

The study, co-authored by Florida State graduate students Adam Fay and Joanna Goplen, is currently under review for publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.