Do you judge your office colleagues as rude? Well, don't be hasty. There's a good chance you're becoming impolite as well.
In a study by colleagues in Washington College of Business Administration in the University of Florida, rudeness or impoliteness can be passed on from one person to the other simply because we tolerate it in the workplace. Trevor Faulk stands as the lead author of the research now published in Journal of Applied Psychology.
Based on the research, there are two ways in which rudeness can spread. In the first situation, a person can become impolite if the other he or she is directly communicating to is showing the same behavior. In the experiment of the researchers involving more than 85 undergraduate students who were simulating negotiations, students who rated their first partners as impolite were likely to receive the same observation from their next partner.
It's also possible to develop impoliteness even if the behavior is not directed toward you. In another experiment, a group was asked to watch a video with characters displaying rudeness. Those who did had the higher chance of being rude when answering the neutral-tone e-mail.
Persons who are exposed to rudeness are also more likely to detect the behavior very quickly. This seems to be evident when another group of students were made to watch an interaction between a student leader and a late comer. When they were later presented with a list of words and made to identify which ones were real and those that were nonsense, they easily related to those related to rudeness.
Unlike other types of abuse such as sexual harassment or direct discrimination, rudeness seems to be subtler and much easier to tolerate. But based on the experiments, the researchers believe it will still have significant negative effect particularly in the long term. The advice? It's time to take rudeness more seriously.
