Rude behaviour spreads like a disease

Many of us get vaccinated ahead of the flu season and the influenza vaccine is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives. But before the vaccine could be developed, scientists first had to identify the cause of influenza — and, importantly, recognise that it was contagious.

New research by Trevor Foulk, Andrew Woolum, and Amir Erez at the University of Florida takes that same first step in identifying a different kind of contagious menace — rudeness.

In a series of studies, Foulk and colleagues demonstrate that being the target of rude behavior, or even simply witnessing rude behavior, induces rudeness.

People exposed to rude behaviour tend to have concepts associated with rudeness activated in their minds, and consequently may interpret ambiguous but benign behaviors as rude. More significantly, they themselves are more likely to behave rudely towards others, and to evoke hostility, negative affect, and even revenge from others.

Previous work on the negative contagion effect, however, has focused primarily on high-intensity behaviors like hitting or abusive supervision that are relatively infrequent in everyday life.

Everyday rudeness Foulk and colleagues wondered about low-intensity negative behaviors, the kind you are likely to encounter in your everyday interactions with co-workers, clients, customers, and peers. We spend far more time with co-workers and clients than we do with supervisors, and so their actions, are likely to have a much broader effect on us.

Evidence for negative contagion among peers and customers might also suggest that there is more than one mode of infection. We are far less likely to intentionally base our behaviour on our customers than our bosses, and thus any behavioural contagion observed in these settings is likely driven by unconscious, unintentional processes rather than by purposeful imitation. Perhaps we can “catch” behaviours without even trying.

In one study, Foulk’s team examined whether observing rude behaviour activates concepts related to rudeness. Participants first completed a brief 15 minutes survey, and when they finished, a confederate playing the part of a late participant arrived at the study and asked to be included in the study. In the control condition, the experimenter politely told the late participant that the experiment had already begun and offered to schedule her for another session. In the negative condition, the experimenter rudely berated the late participant and told her to leave. All participants then completed a lexical decision task (LDT) in which they decided as quickly as possible whether strings of letters (e.g., CHIKHEN) formed a word. Some of the LDT words were friendly (e.g., helpful), some were aggressive (e.g., savage), and some were rude (e.g., tactless). Response times to the friendly and aggressive items were similar across conditions, but response times to the rude items were significantly faster for participants in the negative condition relative to the control condition. People who watched a rude interaction had concepts about rudeness active in their mind, and thus were faster to respond to those concepts in the LDT.

These findings suggest that exposure to rudeness seems to sensitise us to rude concepts in a way that is not intentional or purposeful, but instead happens automatically.