Rudeness is the New Flu
Did you know that rudeness is contagious? A study from the University of Maryland shows that rudeness is as contagious as the common cold. A researcher in organization behavior, Trevor Foulk, stated, “When it comes to incivility, there’s often a snowballing effect. 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.”
Rows over rudeness accelerated after White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was asked to leave a restaurant because employees did not want to serve her and the owner disapproved of her work in the Trump administration. This incident fell on the heels of the heckling of Homeland Security Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, while she tried to finish her dinner at a Mexican restaurant near the White House. Fueling the tension, some politicians, including Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), have called for increased confrontations with Trump administration officials. And recently, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus urged everyone who works for the administration to quit their jobs and avoid further complicity.
So, how do we successfully survive in today’s workplace? Do we fight fire with fire or take the moral high ground? Surprisingly, there is considerable research on the topic, as highlighted in a recent article by William Wan in the Washington Post. In the case of the eatery expulsion, President Trump chose to insult the restaurant owner, Waters and others. Such cycles, repeated on a daily basis and rapidly spreading online, are created 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 those who experienced a perceived insult earlier in the day would later strike back at their coworkers. Using psychological tests, the researchers linked this reaction to lowered levels of self-control.
“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 in a recent interview. “All that thinking lessens your capacity for impulse control. So you become more prone to be rude to others. … People, in a way, ‘pay it forward.’”
The recent rise in incivility has led to increasing research on the topic by social scientists and psychologists. In a series of experiments, for example, Foulk and others showed that the more that people witness and experience rudeness, the more likely they are to interpret an action as rude and then subsequently treat others rudely. “Rudeness is interesting in that it’s often ambiguous and open to interpretation,” said Foulk. “If someone punches you, for example, we would all agree that it’s abusive. But if someone comes up to you and says in a neutral voice ‘nice shoes,’ is that an insult? Is it sarcasm or something else?” The more someone has witnessed rudeness, “the more likely you are to interpret ‘nice shoes’ as deliberately rude.” In a recent study from the Journal of Applied Psychology, for example, workers viewed videos every morning before work. On the mornings when the videos included an uncivil interaction, the workers were more likely to interpret subsequent workplace interactions as rude.
In another study that focused on workplace negotiations, Foulk found that if someone experiences rudeness from a person on the opposing side, they are highly likely to be perceived as rude in their next negotiation. Even when the two negotiations took place several days apart, the toxic effect was just as intense. “What is so scary about this effect is that it’s an automatic process — it takes place in a part of your brain that you are not aware of, can’t stop, and can’t control,” Foulk states.
Other studies also suggest incivility by senior executives has a tremendous influence on the rest of the organization, feeding insolence throughout the ranks. Perhaps the most troublesome issue surrounding this growing incivility is the effect it has on the workforce. Increasing studies confirm that rudeness significantly hampers attentiveness, decreases productivity and impedes creativity. These studies also indicate that incivility lowers trust, fuels anger, stokes fear, stimulates sadness, and causes depression. A study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that incivility in the workplace also has profound implications at home, including a decline in marital satisfaction.
Other recent studies found that doctors and nurses in neonatal intensive care units who were admonished by an actress playing the mother of a sick infant performed much more poorly than those who were not scolded and that they even misdiagnosed the baby’s condition. “The results were scary,” one of the authors reported to the Wall Street Journal. “The teams exposed to rudeness gave the wrong diagnosis, didn’t resuscitate or ventilate appropriately, didn’t communicate well, gave the wrong medications and made other serious mistakes.”
Researchers have struggled in vain to come up with ways to stop the spreading effects of rudeness. Those who studied the hospital neonatal staffs, for example, tried having the doctors and nurses write about their interaction from the perspective of the rude mother. Doing so made no difference.
So, what can we do to survive in these times of incivility and why should we care? According to the research, the best way to survive in today’s toxic workforce is to avoid incivility as much as possible. “When you experience incivility, it’s important to take a step back and not act on your impulses. Do things that help you recover your ability to self-regulate, like exercise or taking a break,” Rosen says. This advice may not be entirely realistic, given the fact that the ripple effects of rudeness are largely unconscious. That said, it is important to maintain self-awareness and restraint. For example, if you are hosting a meeting that starts going down an uncivil path, try to steer the group back to civility. If that does not work, consider ending the engagement and resuming the work after tempers die.
According to P.M. Forni, the co-founder of the Johns Hopkins Civility Project and author of Choosing Civility, “Encouraging civility in the workplace is becoming one of the fundamental corporate goals in our diverse, hurried, stressed and litigation-prone society. A civil workplace is good for workers, since the quality of service they receive from happier and more relaxed service providers is improved.” We should all be concerned about this disturbing trend and do our part to bring civility back to the workplace. After all, it is right and civil thing to do.