F*** You Very Much: The surprising truth about why people are so rude

by Danny Wallace

Compared to the control groups who, remember, were unaware of any of this rude behaviour, the groups that witnessed rudeness did far worse on their tasks. Somehow, that rudeness created a roadblock in their minds. Those who witnessed the latecomer being talked about rudely solved 33 per cent fewer anagrams and came up with nearly 40 per cent fewer ideas for creative uses for a brick. Those who met our ‘busy professor’ – who still sounds like he was wearing a trench coat and a fake moustache – were 61 per cent worse at anagrams and produced 58 per cent fewer ideas for unusual brick use than those who had not been treated rudely at all. Frighteningly, even those who just imagined incivility suffered. Just imagining rudeness makes you worse at thinking up uses for a brick.

No matter how polite we’d like to be, no matter how nice we like to think we are, receiving or witnessing rudeness makes us more cynical, less trusting and even less empathetic. Because in that same study involving creative uses for bricks, like scientific Columbos, Amir Erez and Christine Porath had time for just one more thing. They purposefully had someone ‘accidentally’ drop something. Nearly three-quarters of people who had witnessed no rudeness immediately tried to lend a hand. Of course they did; they’re not animals. But of the people who had been treated rudely by the busy professor? Only 24 per cent felt inclined to help.

A study of 171 people in the legal profession6 showed that after-work recovery was lower on days in which people experienced rudeness at work, and that this continued to the next morning. I told you: it’s a hangover. It can lead to disaster. It can even, if unchecked, lead to depression. Even just on a basic scale, concentration plummets, taking productivity with it. It’s even been shown that people learning new skills – the ukulele, say, or Esperanto – couldn’t focus on these tasks as well as they could on ‘normal’ days.

Dunbar is best known for formulating ‘Dunbar’s number’ – a measurement of the number of people with whom your brain can manage to maintain a stable relationship at any one time. It’s a long and fascinating paper, but if you’re pushed for time, it’s 150.

Urban Overload Hypothesis (coined by the brilliant American social psychologist Stanley Milgram),

According to academics like Nathanael Fast, power without status can lead not only to rudeness, but to abuse and even violence. The relationship between the status of a job and the power it holds is fascinating. It can be the key to why the woman in the bank is so rude to you, or why your torturer turns the screw just a little bit tighter.

A study called ‘The destructive nature of power without status’23 has shown that if it goes unchecked, a combination of a small amount of power and very little status can have devastating effects.

In 1902, Charles Horton Cooley came up with ‘The Looking Glass Self ’, the notion that we use other people’s expressions, behaviours and reactions to define ourselves.

Power is having control. But status is the admiration associated with having that control. When you lack status, you tend already to feel disrespected.

It’s bad because people who feel they have no status often assume you feel the same way about them.

We find it hard to cope with the idea that ‘I’m in charge … why is no one giving me respect?’ We hit out with rudeness at the ‘potentially rude’ as a defence mechanism before they’ve even had the chance not to be.

Sucking up to power works. And the best form of defence if you want to get on in society might just be to kill with kindness.

The latest thinking says that bosses of people in low status jobs should spare time to make their employees feel appreciated. And crucially, if you’re a boss: let them know there is an actual career path that they are heading down. That this isn’t it; they’re not stuck.

Everything was profits and shareholders. Workers were now just cogs in a machine, easily replaced when they became worn out. Ignoring legitimate concerns, browbeating employees – this was corporate rudeness, and it spread like a rash. For many it would become intolerable, this feeling of powerlessness, constantly under stress, like the system is bullying them,

In recent years, a river of hatred towards ‘political correctness’ has turned in to a flood. ‘Why can’t we say anything at all to whomever we choose about whatever we like?’ scream the red-faced, sign-wielding, New Rudeness mobs, furious that someone else’s feelings might be worth the same as their own.

Political correctness has really only ever been a system developed to protect those in a vulnerable position by discouraging those in the majority from needlessly, rudely offending them. Disabled people. Black people. Muslim people. Political correctness in its simplest form just means choosing your words more carefully, but so frothy-mouthed is the horde they can’t see the logic for the bile. ‘These bloody do-gooders!’ they spit. You’ll notice that political correctness is a phrase that often goes hand-in-hand with ‘do-gooders’. People hate do-gooders. These bloody do-gooders, doing good. Well, what’s your chosen alternative, mate? Do-badders? Do-nothings?

‘We’d ask people how much they’d agree with the following statement: “If I was on the Titanic, I would deserve to be on the first life boat.” And the wealthier and more powerful you are in society, the more likely you are to agree with over-the-top statements like that.’

There are constant power struggles happening in our everyday interactions. When they pass without incident, we all understand the unspoken rules of society and just try and get on. When they end up in rudeness, it’s because one or other of us overplays our own importance whether through a lack of self-confidence or thoroughbred arrogance.

TV, radio, online – the content providers know we are drawn to the perversity and thrill of rudeness; we like people losing their cool; we are invigorated by someone else being the butt of a cruel jibe and the dark voyeurism of watching it happen unscathed. It is poisonous. And it feeds stupid people the lie that they don’t have to try and be nice: not if they’re Only Being Honest.

According to the Wallace Report, well over half those asked – 56 per cent – feel that rudeness has indeed affected their mental wellbeing.

‘One of the reasons rudeness is so devastating is that it affects cognition. When people encounter rudeness they can’t think in the same way. We know now that it affects working memory.’

They found that when people experience rudeness, they miss obvious information. ‘Even when it’s in the centre of their visual field.

The teams that experienced no rudeness did just fine. The teams that experienced rudeness fell to pieces. They had trouble communicating, they couldn’t work out how to cooperate, they forgot basic instructions and they misdiagnosed the illness. The doctors asked for the wrong drugs. The nurses prepared the wrong things. They didn’t ventilate the patient in the way they should have, nor did they resuscitate well.

What Erez and Porath discovered is that even one rude comment in a high-pressure environment decreased performance by doctors and nurses in a life or death situation by more than 50 per cent.

over the course of a medical team’s day. They were made to encounter rudeness at the start of their day, this time not from a colleague, but from the presumably distressed mother of an infant. What Erez found was that the rudeness they experienced didn’t just affect their ability to treat the woman or her child in the moment. Nor did it only affect the next person or problem they encountered. ‘It affects them all day,’ says Erez. ‘They go through five patients afterwards. And they just don’t treat them appropriately. The entire day.’ One moment of rudeness in the morning can affect every single patient a doctor meets in their day.

In Europe, the World Health Organization reports that medical errors consistently occur in 8 to 12 per cent of all hospitalisations.

In our last rudeness study, [rudeness] explained 40 per cent of errors.’

Rudeness clouds judgement. And a little-known side effect is that a doctor who experiences it will therefore find it much harder to adapt their thinking. Whatever the first diagnosis is, Erez says, that’s what they’ll be more likely to stick with, even when strong new information enters the frame. It’s called a fixation error. ‘If you give doctors an initial diagnosis – even if it’s a diagnosis that comes from, say, the daughter of a patient, which is very unreliable – but then give them signs that actually point to a different problem, [you find that] people that experience rudeness don’t move from their first, wrong diagnosis.’

A survey of 4,530 doctors, nurses and hospital personnel showed that 71 per cent of them believed that disruptive behaviour – rudeness, abuse, condescension or insulting personal conduct – led to real medical errors; 27 per cent tied it to patient deaths.43