Rudeness kills. It’s official. Not by the single hammer blow to your ego when you’re snubbed at a party, or by the stealth effect of micro-incivilities at work. Although, more on both in a bit, because there have to be health implications to the level of deranged sociopathy that you encounter as “personality” or, say, “your boss” on a daily basis.
No. Rudeness, finds a study from the University of Florida, kills in actual medical procedures where actual doctors fail to treat their colleagues with respect and, in turn, collectively fail to save the patient. That’s the extreme conclusion to impoliteness, one that’s borne out with data – albeit hypothetical – from medical teams working in neonatal intensive care.
The accepted wisdom is that rudeness damages your ability to think; your focus or clarity in making decisions short-circuits because you’re busy dismantling and reassembling the mental playback of the rudeness you just suffered. That’s just a given. Yesterday, a colleague pretended to have met me for the first time (it was the dozenth time) at an all-women dinner launching a new all-women channel online and I haven’t stopped boring on about my explicitly unsisterly thoughts since. I might write an entire column around it.
That’s the hyper-neurotic end of the scale, but consider the life-and-death impact in an operating theatre: one surgeon thinks being efficient is synonymous with being an abject arsehole, the team’s performance plummets and the patient dies. In reality, Professor Erez’s study found that test teams subjected to a flash dose of discourtesy misdiagnosed illnesses, forgot instructions, mixed up medication and didn’t ask for help when they needed it; the control team was judged to be 52% better at diagnosing disease and 43% at treating it. So rude!
And yet, ask the average person for the definition of rudeness – and I did, via the scientific method of an email straw poll – and the results are bizarre. For instance, everyone agrees on the restaurant test: do you treat waiters well? Pass! Move on, you’re a basic human being. No? You’re probably Jeremy Clarkson. Sorry.
But what is the general view on, say, strolling past a two-hour queue to get into a poncey London restaurant, claiming a reservation you don’t have, and being seated within 10 minutes? One “friend” emailed that as proof that I can be rude. I categorise that as blagging. Rude would have been to stick two fingers up to the people waiting in the cold for their overrated dinner. The same friend mailed again, and mentioned “that time you ran across the square to get the last picnic table ahead of the group walking in front of us”. Again, not rude, just spirited.
Do you consider yourself to be rude? It’s not a question that most people – including me – would nod to. But if the definition swerves from “do you like to get things done in a brisk, efficient fashion?” to “do you scroll through your phone while holding a real-life conversation?” (yes to both, obviously), I think we need to download a universal update on human civility. Real rudeness, like terrible comedy, punches down: it’s why the image of a neurosurgeon having a hissy fit at a nurse makes Erez’s data so unpleasant to process, but calling out my boss as a sociopath is fine. I think.
It’s also why I reckon the feedback from my own research is wrong: the idea that “abrasive”, “brazen” and, as one person put it, “shameless” are personality traits interchangeable with “rude” does a disservice to the truly awful people who are designed to make the rest of us look better. And they’re the ones you really have to worry about. Psychologist Kevin Dutton has talked a convincing game on society’s need for psychopaths. His book The Wisdom of Psychopaths insists that individuals with “a distinct subset of personality characteristics such as ruthlessness, fearlessness, self-confidence, focus, coolness under pressure, mental toughness and a zero-calorie conscience” are needed for economies to grow and governments to flourish. And you can bet they’re rude as hell.
London is powered by on the brisk momentum of what plenty of people would consider assertiveness, but outright rudeness is a different ballgame. Personally, I take the Elaine-Benes-from-Seinfeld approach. As played so brilliantly by Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the 90s, she is, on the one hand, the woman to whom I relate most in all popular culture. On the other, she will make no bones about saying someone has an ugly baby. Or telling people their opinions on The English Patient are garbage. Not rudeness, just aggressive honesty.
Manners clearly have their place, but claiming that a quick glimpse at your phone over the course of a three-hour dinner signals the end of decorum is a wildly antiquated view. The stickler brigade, often stuck in a Venn diagram with the fun jockeys that are grammar pedants, need to get a grip. It’s 2015. How are any of you ever getting anything done?
