Right or wrong, rudeness can be catchy, experts say
WASHINGTON — These are rude times we live in.
And many people find themselves struggling with how to respond. Do they fight fire with fire or try somehow to take the moral high ground?
Scientific research has quite a lot to say about it all.
Trevor Foulk, who researches organizational behavior at the University of Maryland, likens rudeness to the common cold: It’s contagious.
“The more you see rudeness, the more likely you are to perceive it from others and the more likely you are to be rude yourself to others,” he said.
The debate over civility kicked into high gear recently after a Virginia restaurant asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave because employees didn’t want to serve her. That followed the heckling of Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen as she ate at a D.C. Mexican restaurant.
Some people, like Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif, have called for more such confrontations with Trump officials. Others warn of a race to the bottom and plea for an end to the boorishness.
Trump opted for insulting the restaurant, Waters and others.
Trump tweeted “The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!”
Such political cycles, now repeated on a weekly or even daily basis and spreading quickly online, are driven in part by our unconscious reactions, experts say.
In a 2016 study, Christopher Rosen, an organizational scientist at the University of Arkansas, tracked employees over the course of their work days. He and fellow researchers found that individuals who experienced a perceived insult earlier in the day would later strike back at co-workers. Using psychological tests, the researchers linked that reaction to lowered levels of selfcontrol.
“When someone is uncivil to you, it forces you to spend a lot of mental energy trying to figure out what’s going on, what caused the rudeness, what it means,” Rosen said this week. “All that thinking lessens your capacity for impulse control. So you become more prone to be rude to others.” In recent years, rising concerns over incivility — insults, condescension, dismissiveness and the like — have led to increasing research on the topic by social scientists and psychologists.
In one study, workers were shown videos every morning before work. On the mornings when those videos included an uncivil interaction, the workers were more likely to interpret subsequent interactions throughout their day as rude.
In another study on negotiations, Foulk found that if someone experiences rudeness from a person on the opposing side, the next person they negotiate with is highly likely to perceive them as rude, too. Even when the two negotiations took place seven days apart, the contagion effect was just as strong.
Other studies also suggest incivility by top brass — whether immediate supervisors or CEOs — has an outsize influence on the uncivil behavior of those below them. But perhaps most worrisome is the effect of all this growing incivility.
Mounting research shows rudeness can cause employees to be chronically distracted, less productive and less creative. Researchers have shown how incivility can lower trust, spark feelings of anger, fear and sadness, and cause depression.