How Rude!

It’s not your imagination: rudeness appears to be on the rise. Witnessing rude behavior — whether it's coming from angry customers berating a store clerk or airline passengers getting into a fistfight — can have long-lasting effects on our minds. But behavioral scientist Christine Porath says there are ways to shield ourselves from the toxic effects of incivility.

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How Rude!

By Hidden Brain Staff

/ August 5, 2024

It’s not your imagination: rudeness appears to be on the rise. Witnessing rude behavior — whether it’s coming from angry customers berating a store clerk or airline passengers getting into a fistfight — can have long-lasting effects on our minds. But behavioral scientist Christine Porath says there are ways to shield ourselves from the toxic effects of incivility.

Additional Resources:

BOOKS: 

Mastering Community: The Surprising Ways Coming Together Moves Us from Surviving to Thriving by Christine Porath, 2022.

Insight: Why We’re Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life, by Tasha Eurich, 2017.

Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace, by Christine Porath, 2016.

The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It, by Christine Pearson and Christine Porath, 2009.

RESEARCH:

Trapped by a First Hypothesis: How Rudeness Leads to Anchoring, by Binyamin Cooper, et. al, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2022.

Make Civility the Norm on Your Team, by Christine Porath, Harvard Business Review, 2018.

The Key to Campbell Soup’s Turnaround? Civility, by Christine Porath and Douglas R. Conant, Harvard Business Review, 2017.

How Rudeness Stops People From Working Together, by Christine Porath, Harvard Business Review, 2017.

Does Rudeness Really Matter? The Effects of Rudeness on Task Performance and Helpfulness, by Christine L. Porath and Amir Erez, Academy of Management Journal, 2017.

An Antidote to Incivility, by Christine Porath, Harvard Business Review, 2016.

The Hidden Toll of Workplace Incivility, by Christine Porath, McKinsey Quarterly, 2016.

Catching Rudeness Is Like Catching a Cold: The Contagion Effects of Low-Intensity Negative Behaviors, by Trevor Foulk, Andrew Woolum, and Amir Erez, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2016.

Does Civility Pay?, by Christine L. Porath and Alexandra Gerbasi, Organizational Dynamics, 2015.

The Impact of Rudeness on Medical Team Performance: A Randomized Trial, by Arieh Riskin, et al, Pediatrics, 2015.

The Price of Incivility: Lack of Respect in the workplace hurts morale-and the bottom line, by Christine Porath and Christine Pearson, Harvard Business Review, 2013.

Creating Sustainable Performance, by Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath, Harvard Business Review, 2012.

Toward Human Sustainability: How to Enable More Thriving at Work, by Gretchen Spreitzer, Christine L. Porath, and Cristina B. Gibson, Organizational Dynamics, 2012.

Overlooked But Not Untouched: How Rudeness Reduces Onlookers’ Performance on Routine and Creative Tasks, by Christine L. Porath and Amir Erez, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2009.

GRAB BAG:

Why Being Respectful to Your Coworkers is Good for Business, by Christine Porath, TED Talk, January 2018.

Do Nice People Finish Last or Best? by Christine Porath, TED Talk, February 2018.

Christine Porath’s Georgetown University webpage

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Parents, at least of a certain era, used to tell their kids, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." Such advice might seem quaint today. No matter where we look, it can feel as if we are living in a time of mounting incivility. Smartphones and social media amplified this feeling. It used to be that when two people got into an argument in a parking lot or on an airplane, only a few people heard it. But today, thousands of people witness rude interactions among people they'll never meet. It's become the stuff of viral videos and memes.Man 1: We're not talking to you. We're talking.Man 2: Why don't you mind your own business?Man 1: We're not talking to you.Man 2: We're not one of these people that work here, so get out of my face.Shankar Vedantam: We often tell ourselves to ignore insults and slights, yet psychological experiments show that this is not easy to do and that rudeness has a long lasting malevolent power.Christine Porath: We're flooded with emotions and that's when this fight or flight gear kicks in. One way that I think about this is like the storm inside your brain.Shankar Vedantam: The surprising effect of instability and how to protect yourself from its toxic influence, this week on Hidden Brain.Shankar Vedantam: Rudeness and incivility seem to be showing up everywhere these days on airplanes, in supermarket aisles, in restaurants. What effect does this tide of nastiness have on all of us? According to the old adage, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. But is this really true? At Georgetown University, Behavioral Scientist, Christine Porath, studies the effects of incivility on our communities, our careers, even our capacity for creativity.Shankar Vedantam: Christine Porath, welcome to Hidden Brain.Christine Porath: Thanks for having me.Shankar Vedantam: I want to start by having you tell me about a moment in your own life, Christine, where you saw the effect of incivility firsthand. You were still a student in college when you received word that your dad was in the hospital. Can you describe the scene for me when you got there?Christine Porath: Well, I remember vividly walking up to the hospital room and being in the doorway and seeing him lying there in the hospital bed with electrodes strapped to his bare chest and it was shocking for me to see him like that because he was an otherwise very strong, vivacious athletic guy and I had never envisioned something like that happening to him.Shankar Vedantam: Why was he in the hospital?Christine Porath: Well, he had had a heart attack and this stemmed from working for a very toxic boss. He had actually worked for two toxic bosses for over the course of a decade and it was really coming to a breaking point and it wasn't until about a decade later or more, that he shared some of the particulars and really spoke openly

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