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?
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