Why is everyone so rude right now?
A few months ago, I went to Seattle for a business trip. I was looking forward to revisiting the city, a place I had grown to love and had been to half a dozen times.
When I jumped into a local cab from the airport, I greeted the driver, but she didn’t reciprocate, which I was used to coming from New York City. When we arrived at my location, she didn’t help me with my bags. I still left a tip. At the hotel, the automatic doors were broken. As I was making my way to the hotel’s side door, a man pushed past me, barked at me to move, swung the door open, and slammed it in my face. After checking into my hotel room, I looked at my watch and saw that I needed to meet a colleague at the office. While hustling to leave on time, I thought I locked myself out of my hotel room. I went down to the concierge and asked for another room key, explaining to the woman at the front desk that I had accidentally locked myself out. The woman, who looked like she was a little bit older than me, blurted out loud without even looking up, “That’s pretty stupid of you.”
Unsure how to react, I just stared at her in silence as she slowly made me a new room key and tossed it in my direction. When I left the hotel, I couldn’t help but think: Why is everyone so rude right now?
It turned out my original room key was safely tucked away in my back pocket.
@jareenimam It’s not in your head, civility is dead @jareenimam #takeaNAIRbreak #understandingourselves #burnedoutadult #rudepeopleoftiktok #betterjob #workculturematters ♬ Succession Main Theme (From " Succession") - Geek Music
Why are people mean, rude, and disrespectful?
It’s not just you, people are getting ruder. Social media is flooded with videos of angry customers yelling at service workers, patients fighting with healthcare personnel, and even Americans sparing with other Americans while shopping for groceries. Since the mid-2000s, journalists, researchers, and philosophers have pondered whether our society is getting ruder. And the answer is, yes. But why?
Theories about why incivility is rising range from the anonymity of social media platforms, which have made us more emotionally disconnected from each other to stressful working environments, which are causing people to take their workplace traumas back to their personal lives. And it appears the stress of the pandemic has only made matters worse for some people who haven’t been able to cope with the stress and anxiety of the unknown.
David H. Rosmarin is an assistant professor of psychology in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, and he is a clinician at McLean Hospital. He said in a 2020 interview that the hospital program he runs, Spirituality and Mental Health program, has observed rising levels of anger. And that anger is manifesting itself as aggression and domestic abuse. When it comes to the pandemic, there’s heightened fear, anxiety, and depression, which has also fueled people’s anger.
“One of the ways of thinking about anger — which I find helpful from a clinical standpoint — is to conceptualize it as a secondary emotion. Fear, anger, joy, and sadness are your four primary emotions, and secondary emotions occur as a reaction to our primary emotions, rather than to the situation,” he said to the Harvard Gazette.
Rudeness is rising, and that’s a serious problem
Incivility is rising — and that’s a bad thing, Christine Porath, a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and author of “Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace,” said in an interview on the NPR podcast “The Hidden Brain.”
Rudeness takes an emotional toll on us. When we encounter incivility, it puts us in fight or flight mode. Oftentimes, we endure the abuse and stay silent. But the pain lingers long after.
“Incivility is so costly,” Porath said to Forbes. “It robs cognitive resources, hijacks performance and creativity, and sidelines people from their work. Incivility impairs thinking. People miss information right in front of them.”
Porath’s team wanted to learn more about the hidden costs of rudeness on people’s brains. They ran an experiment with two groups. One group was subjected to rudeness. The other group was not. After their sessions, both groups were given a brick. Researchers asked the subjects what they could do with a brick. The control group, the one that didn’t face any rudeness, had creative ideas, like building homes and making art. The group that endured rudeness had destructive answers. They said they could hit people with the brick and break someone’s nose. This showed researchers that rudeness can negatively impact people’s cognitive skills and creative abilities.
Why are customers angry at retail and service workers?
There are also cultural reasons why people are ruder nowadays. For instance, the “customer is always right” model, which became popularized across retail and service industries after World World II, has enabled people to abuse retail, service, healthcare, and hospitality workers. And because consumer purchasing power is so important to businesses, most companies allow their employees to be mistreated, berated, abused, or sometimes even physically assaulted. The pandemic put renewed focus on how much abuse workers endure from customers, from passengers on airplanes yelling and hitting flight attendants because they didn’t want to wear masks, to customers throwing food at service staff when they were unhappy with their orders.
“We’ve gone past the point where the retailer was in charge to a point in society where the customer is in charge,” Mark Cohen, an adjunct professor and director of retail studies at Columbia University, told Insider in 2021.
Some workers have reached their limit. Since the pandemic started, there’s been a rise of retail and service workers who have quit or refused to go back to their old jobs because of low pay, hard working conditions, and rude customers.
Acting mean, rude, and disrespectful makes us feel powerful
Rudeness is contagious. When someone yells at us, we’re likely to pass on that negative emotion to someone else. Trevor Foulk, who researches organizational behavior at the University of Maryland, told the Washington Post that rudeness is sort of like the common cold. It’s easy to catch and pass on to others.
“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,” he said.
@jareenimam Reply to @nicolinasar everyone is mean now @jareenimam #MoveWithTommy #understandingourselves #burnedoutadult #rudepeopleoftiktok #workculturematters #qualityofliving ♬ Blade Runner 2049 - Synthwave Goose
Radical candor can disguise rudeness and mean behavior
Rudeness has also found its way into our homes as people continue to work from home. Whether it’s subject line only emails, curt slack messages, or colleagues scolding you, incivility has become pervasive.
At the streaming company Netflix, for example, three marketing managers were fired in July 2021 after making disparaging comments about their coworkers, according to TIME.
“What happened here was unfortunately not simply venting on Slack or a single conversation,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos wrote in a comment on LinkedIn. “These were critical, personal comments made over several months about their peers…including during meetings when those peers were talking or presenting.”
Sarandos faced backlash for his comments from some Netflix leaders who claim that the company’s culture of radical candor allows for this sort of communication.
If you don’t know, in 2017, a new workplace trend caught on in management: radical candor. But Kim Scott, the ex-Google employee who defined the term and wrote the book, “Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity,” said radical candor is most successful when paired with caring, meaning the intention behind your bluntness is to do good and uplift others. However, some companies and managers have taken radical candor to the extreme in the workplace by publicly shaming employees for poor performance in front of their peers.
How do we protect ourselves from rudeness?
Rudeness hurts us emotionally, and it has become more common to be rude than to be nice to each other. I once heard someone say that being polite is so rare that people nowadays confuse it with flirting.
Like most of us, I don’t like when people are rude to me. Rudeness affects me emotionally. When the hotel worker called me stupid and threw the room key at me, I thought about that exchange for weeks afterward. My meeting with the colleague after that exchange felt uninspired because I was thinking about what that woman said to me. Since rudeness impacts so many of us negatively, how do we protect ourselves?
Most people lack self-awareness, Porath said. And they typically don’t know they are being rude. Generally, people are unaware of their tone or attitude. Based on her research, only 4% of people intentionally try to hurt others for fun.
When someone is being rude or hurtful to me nowadays, I try to point it out in a gentle but firm way by saying: “The way you’re speaking to me is making me uncomfortable.”
I’ve found that this phrasing has helped me navigate difficult personalities in more productive ways. However, I do think personal safety should always be your number one priority. Therefore, if you can avoid or limit your interactions with rude people, it’s best to do it because it’s hard to determine how strangers will react when confronted with their bad behavior.
Sometimes, we can’t avoid rudeness. But if we do face it, we can try to be conscious of not passing it on to others by giving ourselves time to recover after a negative interaction. We can reduce the impact of rudeness by focusing on our personal happiness, growth, and wellbeing.
The best way we can protect ourselves from rudeness is with a resilient mindset, which we can build by having creative passions, strong support systems, and fulfilling relationships.
At the end of the day, your emotional well-being matters. If you don’t want to deal with rude people at work, you don’t have to. Thanks to our globalized society, there are more opportunities than ever before to find better jobs, better work cultures, and better quality of life. It just takes a little bit of time and energy to find the best environment, career, and place that fits your needs.
