By Channing Joseph
Just as a sick person can give the flu to everyone in her household, a mean person can infect everyone around him with his stank attitude. Yes, folks, rudeness spreads like a virus, according to psychology researchers at the University of Florida.
After conducting a series of three studies — whose results were recently published in the Journal of Applied by Psychology — Trevor Foulk and his team say they have scientifically confirmed something that many of us have experienced first-hand: When you are exposed to the rude behavior of a colleague, you are more likely to be rude to someone else later, passing your upturned nose to the next person, in a potentially endless cycle of negative emotions, hostility and even revenge.
The new research is believed to be the first to show that impoliteness can spread like a disease in organizational environments like workplaces and schools. The researchers’ explanation for the phenomenon is that seeing or experiencing rudeness signals our brains to be on the lookout for it.
One of the researchers’ studies looked at 90 graduate students and asked the students to rate their classmates during a one-on-one negotiation. If participants rated their first partner as rude, they themselves were more likely to be rated as rude by their next negotation partner. The effect lasted a long time, too: It was noticeable even when the negotiations were held a week apart.
“Rudeness has an incredibly powerful negative effect on the workplace,” Foulk said.
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In a second study, Foulk and his team — fellow grad student Andrew Woolum and professor Amir Erez — showed one group of participants a video of a polite interaction while they showed another group a video of a rude one. Those who viewed the rude interaction were more likely to respond to a rude email in an impolite way than those who had watched the polite interaction, the researchers said.
Their conclusion? We can “catch” rudeness just by seeing someone else getting mistreated, even if we ourselves aren’t the direct target.
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In the third and final study, the scientists looked at a group of 47 undergraduate students and found that those exposed to rude behavior were actually better at a task identifying “rude” words in strings of random-looking letters, showing that seeing nasty behavior has a measurable effect on our brains, priming us to see bad actors everywhere — even where they may not exist, they said.
Sadly, there is no vaccine for the spread of rudeness. Until there is, MTV readers, can we all just try to get along?
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