Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck

by Amy Alkon

But at the root of manners is empathy. When you’re unsure of what to say or do, there’s a really easy guideline, and it’s asking yourself, Hey, self! How would I feel if somebody did that to me?

Gandhi, who was asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”

The problem seems to be the size of our neocortex, the brain’s reasoning and communication department. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar noticed that in various animals, neocortex size corresponded to the maximum number of others of their species they could associate with without chaos and violence breaking out. Dunbar looked at the human neocortex size and predicted that humans would have the capacity to manage social interaction in societies with a maximum of 150 people (148.7, to be exact).

Whatever the exact limit of human social relationships, Dunbar notes that sociologists have long recognized that there’s something unmanageable about groups of more than 150 to 200.

Being around people you know doesn’t just deter rude behavior; it promotes neighborly behavior. In a small, finite community, reputation is a major concern.

Letting the rude get away with robbing you emboldens them to keep robbing you—and the rest of us. We all need to start identifying the rude as the thieves they are, which is what it will take for more people to get mad enough to get up on their hind legs and refuse to be victimized. Exposing rude behavior to a wide audience is particularly important.

He explains in his book Just Listen that almost all communication is an effort to persuade people, whether we want them to give us a job, agree to a date, or just find us witty. We think we persuade people by using reason and facts. But, Goulston explains, they won’t hear our reasoning unless we connect with them—ask them about themselves, truly listen to them, and make them feel heard, valued, and understood. This breaks down their resistance. They can stop fighting us off and relax, and it’s only then that they can hear what we’re saying, consider it, and maybe come around to doing what we want them to do.

In Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict, she observes that a “missing link in our understanding of conflict” is “our failure to realize how vulnerable humans are to being treated as if they didn’t matter.” Respecting people’s dignity takes what I think of as applied grace. It involves extending yourself to make people feel they belong. It also involves giving them the benefit of the doubt (using Hicks’s suggestion to start from the premise that they are acting with integrity). And it involves treating them like their opinion and feelings mean something. Hicks believes that a violation of our dignity—having our worth dismissed—probably has such a devastating effect on us because of our evolved drive to protect our reputation.

Getting someone to feel remorse for demeaning you unnecessarily is probably more effective in inspiring them to mend their ways than trying to make them fear you, especially if you aren’t a particularly scary person. Perhaps more important, by calling somebody on their rotten treatment of you, you become a person who refuses to take crap from people, bolstering your dignity in your own eyes. You can’t always stop people from kicking you when you’re down, but you don’t have to roll over for them so they can land better blows.

The ability to say no comes out of self-respect. For people who have it, standing up for themselves is second nature. Unfortunately, developing self-respect generally takes a good bit of time. Do get to work on that if you’re in need. (Nathaniel Branden’s book The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem is an excellent resource.)

It’s criticism and blame—statements that attack and diminish a person—that fire up this defense system, causing people to rationalize and defend their behavior and then attack you for attacking them.

research in psychology and addiction treatment suggests that leading them to their own conclusions is more effective than hammering them with mine. Addiction treatment specialist Stanton Peele explains that telling people what to do just makes them defensive, leading them to cling to whatever they were doing instead of being open to giving it up. “People change their behavior when they sort it out in their own mind that what they’re doing violates what they care most about and what they want most for themselves,”

When one of these spitebags hurls a put-down at you, they expect that you’ll either try to fight back or just stand there blinking and wishing you could disappear. Instead, you should do the last thing they’d expect: Look straight at them for a moment, and coolly call them on their rottenness with a remark like “Clearly, you must have had a pretty bad day to feel the need to say something so nasty to me. I hope you feel better.” (Sincerity is not required here—just believability—so say it devoid of anger, and sound like you mean it.) By expressing sympathy for them, you’ve accomplished three things: 1. You’ve refused to accept their turning you into their victim. 2. You’ve come off classy and bigger than they are. 3. You still managed to stick it to them, sending the message, “Sorry your life is such a suckhole that your lone path to happiness is trying to make other people feel like shit.”

The truth is, calling somebody on their bad behavior in anything but a roundabout way tends to provoke denials, which are basically angry attempts to save face.

Men will insist that they love when women ask them out—and they do. They love the ego-rub, but they tend to devalue the woman who gives it to them, just as they’ll often lose interest in a woman who has sex with them right away. Once again, the evolutionary explanation applies. Women evolved to be the choosier sex because of the costs of pregnancy and feeding and raising any resulting child, and men co-evolved to expect female choosiness, and they value women they have to work to get.

In other words, men need to accept that dating costs money and that just because a woman can afford to pay on the first date or first few dates, that doesn’t mean she should. When a man pays, graciously and seamlessly, for the first and second date, he’s meeting a woman’s psychological need to seek a man who is generous and willing to invest.30

Anthropologist Robert Trivers explains in his famous 1971 paper on reciprocal altruism that our sense of outrage at cheaters and rule-breakers probably developed when our ancestors started living cooperatively in small, stable hunter-gatherer bands. In an environment where group members survive by trading food and favors, there’s a need to guard against the shifty-ass cheaters whose idea of reciprocity is give-and-take—you give; they take. To keep the two-legged rats at bay, our psychology evolved to include a cheater detection and punishment department, logging who owes what to whom and dispatching that information to the enforcement division, our emotions. When somebody’s done us a good deed, guilt wells up in us, reminding us that we’d better hop to it and repay their kindness. In response to a take-take-taker, anger rises in us, messaging us that somebody seems overdue for a beatdown. Trivers calls the rage we evolved to feel in response to an injustice “moralistic aggression” and notes that it’s often way out of proportion to the offense committed.

only a few among us are what economists call “costly punishers”—people (like me) who get so enraged by injustices they see that they can’t help but go after the perpetrators, and never mind the potential costs.

Finally, it can help to recognize that whether you excuse a driver’s behavior as a result of simply being confused or preoccupied (rather than flagrantly rude) often depends on whether you happen to be that driver. This is called “attribution bias” and describes how we tend to think far more charitably about ourselves and our own behavior than other people and theirs. It’s something to remember the next time the light turns green and the driver in front of you is just sitting there growing roots—just like he did at the previous light. Consider the possibility that he is lost and looking down at his directions—tempted as you are to believe that he knows who you are, sat outside your house waiting for you to leave, and then followed you down the road just to screw with you.

And should you observe another passenger trying to squeeze a little human decency out of a boor, you might pipe up in support. Because we evolved to care about preserving our reputation, group dismay at our behavior weighs heavily on us—even when it’s just a group of two. Even the tiniest squeak of “He’s right, you know!” can serve to temporarily civilize the airborne savage.

The eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith explained that evoking sympathy is a strong human motivator, and studies have shown that giving a reason behind a request makes people more likely to fulfill it.

Applying or removing nail polish is one of the rudest things you can do in an enclosed space like an airplane cabin—basically gassing everyone in a dozen or more rows in front of and behind you with toxic fumes.

It really does come down to this: Your right to bring your screaming child on a plane ends where the rest of our ears begin.

As in other areas of our lives, rudeness in eating, drinking, and socializing almost always comes down to a failure in empathy

As the old saying about success goes, a lot of being successful in comforting somebody seriously ill is just showing the hell up.

An apology is basically Metamucil for the Soul—a remarkably speedy evacuator of backed-up guilt. Unfortunately, many people seem to favor Chickenshit for the Soul—refusing to apologize because they see an admission of wrongdoing on their part as a sign of weakness.

Apology expert and psychiatrist Aaron Lazare explained in Psychology Today that “the exchange of shame and power between the offender and the offended” is what makes an apology work. By slighting somebody, you’ve kicked them in their self-concept, but by admitting you’ve wronged them, you’re reversing the shame they feel and putting it on yourself. “In acknowledging your shame,” wrote Lazare, “you give the offended the power to forgive.”

A number of studies show that a costly apology is a more meaningful apology, that you’re more likely to be forgiven if your apology involves some sort of payout or is accompanied by a gift.

When somebody’s remorseless about injuring you, it’s wise to be mindful of the need to keep your distance while also accepting that what’s done is done. However, when somebody who’s wronged you shows you that they are genuinely sorry and gives you reason to believe they mean it and won’t repeat their behavior, it’s time to scrub their name from the no-fly list in your brain and shoo away your bad feelings about them.

To understand how meaning relates to happiness, it’s important to understand that being happy doesn’t necessarily mean getting into a cheery mood. Sure, feeling cheery is a kind of happiness, but a deeper, more sustaining happiness is an overall sense of well-being and satisfaction with your life. In Frankl’s words, this sort of happiness “cannot be pursued; it must ensue.” He went on to explain that “it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the byproduct of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

fulfillment is through our relationship with and positive effect on others.

the increase in rudeness we’re experiencing traces back to how we’re living so antithetically to millions of years of our evolved psychology, in societies too big for our brains—vast strangeropolises where some of us can go an entire day without seeing any (or many) people we know. Going about life in a sea of strangers not only enables the rude but also causes us stress and anxiety—as well as hindering feelings of well-being, and maybe not just because of the surge in rudeness.

“the compassion we feel for others is not solely a function of what befalls them: if our minds draw an association between a victim and ourselves—even a relatively trivial one—the compassion we feel for his or her suffering is amplified greatly.”

DeSteno suggests drawing a compassion-increasing association between yourself and, say, some guy who lives down your block by thinking of that guy as a fan of the same local restaurant instead of a member of a different ethnicity. The problem is, when we encounter strangers, we’re often lacking in any sort of shared context that would allow us to quickly imagine a connection. This is why I think we need to look at all people, including strangers, as co-humans, related to us in how they surely love their dog, hate Microsoft Word, feel pain when they get cut, and prefer chocolate to broccoli.

I don’t have perfect manners. What I do have is a habit of looking at my behavioral failures, assessing how I screwed up, promising myself I’ll do better, and doing my best to follow through.