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Medicine Businesses Science

The Science of Incivility 108

Posted by Soulskill from the listen-to-this-jerkbag-for-a-second dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Stress causes health issues — we've known this for years. But what's harder to figure out is what exactly qualifies as stress. It's easy to understand that working as an EMT or police officer can be stressful. But as medical researchers are beginning to learn, minor stress events common to all workplaces eventually add up — the cumulative stress from workplace incivility can have huge consequences for both health and performance. "A study published in 2012 that tracked women for 10 years concluded that stressful jobs increased the risk of a cardiovascular event by 38 percent. ... In [another] study, the experimenter belittled the peer group of the participants, who then performed 33 percent worse on anagram word puzzles and came up with 39 percent fewer creative ideas during a brainstorming task focused on how they might use a brick." Many people brush off efforts to be civil, saying they have too little time, or too much on their mind. But further studies have shown it takes very little — a smile here and there, or the occasional "thank you" — to have surprisingly strong effects on how people are perceived. The article argues that it's worth the effort, given the costs for failure.
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The Science of Incivility More

The Science of Incivility

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  • Be Nice (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Be nice to people on the way up, because you're going to meet them again on the way down :)

    • Re:Be Nice (Score:4, Informative)

      by weilawei ( 897823 ) on Sunday June 21, 2015 @09:39AM (#49956205)

      Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naïve, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

      -- RAH

      • Why do you have to make everything relate to pornography?

        • Are we not conversing on the Internet?

          The Internet is for porn
          Trekkie!
          The Internet is for porn
          What are you doing?
          Why you think the net was born?
          Porn, porn, porn!

  • FDA bans frowns and criticism citing impact to healthcare costs

    • "FDA bans frowns and criticism..."

      If we did that, then the DEA would make possession of computers a capital offense. But it's not that likely that Andrew Cuomo or Carly Fiorina will be nominated, let alone win.

  • smile here and there (Score:4, Funny)

    by turkeydance ( 1266624 ) on Sunday June 21, 2015 @07:33AM (#49955817)
    so NSA will wonder what you're up to.

  • The Internet Community (Score:5, Insightful)

    by KermodeBear ( 738243 ) on Sunday June 21, 2015 @07:48AM (#49955867) Homepage

    And one might want to look at how the nastiness of Internet forums contributes to this as well. What happens when an entire society is constantly bombarded with the kind of crap we see every day?

    So next time you decide to post some trolling bullcrap, remember that your behavior does, indeed, have a real effect on the other people involved.

    Don't be a dick. It's not that hard and we're all better off.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The worst of the worst of what you're talking about seems to come from those who are promoting what they call social justice.

      They discriminate the hardest of all, especially when they're saying how bad discrimination is.

      They bully the hardest of all, especially when they're saying how bad bullying is.

      They hate the hardest of all, especially when they're saying how bad hatred is.

      They create the most toxic environment, especially when they're saying how bad toxic environments are.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        So you claim to be the victim of people you blame for claiming to be victims. This is getting a bit too meta for me.

        • SJW's do not claim to be victims. They claim to champion victims even when said victims say they don't need it. Besides, the parent didn't claim any victimhood, just made observations.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by serviscope_minor ( 664417 )

            At this point, the phrase "SJW" has more or less lost meaning. It's used as a generalised "shit I hate on the internet" insult as SJWs seem to be blamed for more or less everything no matter how unrelated to social justice. As a result it's used to try to shut down conversations since calling someone an "SJW" is an attempt to associate them with all manner of evils. Kinda like Godwinning.

            As a result, anyone accusing someone else of being an "SJW" without irony should be regarded with the deepest suspicion.

  • Most common reason not listed? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21, 2015 @07:54AM (#49955879)

    The reasons for being people incivil seem rather petty. The most common reason I find myself getting short with people in working life is when they aren't listening or are otherwise ignoring reasonable questions and requests. Unfortunately a lot of people feel that if they blow someone off politely and then that person repeats the request or question in a more direct manner, that person has some kind of personality defect or "communication issue".

    Typical conversation that is sure to end in problems:

    Me: Hello. My project is using your project to achieve goal X, and we noticed that you are doing Y which causes problems for our task and probably others too. Y does not seem to work properly. We cannot make progress until this issue is resolved. Perhaps a better way to do things would be Z, but I didn't see any discussion of it in your documents - have you considered that approach before?

    Them: Hello. Thankyou for your feedback. We will take it into consideration.

    Me: Thanks for the response. Do you have any timeline or near time plans to resolve the issue? We cannot make progress on our task until your team resolves this issue.

    Them: [no response]

    Me: Hello, we need this issue to be resolved within the next week or else our team will miss our deadlines.

    Them: After a careful review, we believe that our current approach is balanced and reasonable. You may consider workaround W.

    Me: Thanks for the suggestion. Attempting to do W would consume impractical amounts of time, cost the company large sums of money and additionally, make no sense for reason R. Please respond to the original question you were asked four weeks ago.

    Them: [escalation to manager/HR]

    I can't be the only one who has experienced this. Workplaces seem to be full of delicate snowflakes who either ignore any criticism of their work, and when they can't ignore it interpret it as 'incivility'. The article alludes to this though: it says there's often an inverse correlation between perceived politeness and competence. Perhaps people understand at some deeper level that people who are polite often don't get results, or don't tell it like it is.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Them: [escalation to manager/HR]

      Then you escalate to your manager, and the managers resolve the issue and direct the subordinates to execute the task. Just because you have a good idea for another group's project/work doesn't mean they are required to implement it, even if your idea is better in every way and fixes said issue. It may seem necessary to you but if it doesn't affect their work, then it's optional to them (unless directed to execute). This is just common work flow, not people being 'snow flakes' who ignore criticism. People

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        > Just because you have a good idea for another group's project/work doesn't mean they are required to implement it, even if your idea is better in every way and fixes said issue.

        Actually It often does. If you are paid to produce result X in a functional area your group owns, you have to get through blocks to X, and are typically empowered via delegation with the actual authority from your enterprise.

        If another group is a block but has a soft remit - minimise your contact surface or route around them com

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by umghhh ( 965931 )
      In my career in big corp I started with arguments as in your short sketch and augmented my approach with escalations to technical authority. This worked till bookkeepers forced us to optimize on use of technical authority which back then was company wide with spocs etc. I was forced to use abuse in form of forcing the enemy to publicly admit failure. This stopped working few years later as we moved to modern leaderless way of working so there was nobody to front the show of shame and blame - people just do

    • there's often an inverse correlation between perceived politeness and competence. Perhaps people understand at some deeper level that people who are polite often don't get results, or don't tell it like it is.

      That's probably because rude incompetent assholes tend to get fired much more quickly than rude competent assholes.

    • I think you might be the snowflake here. I get this all the time. Someone thinks their project is more important than everyone else, and they are the only person to ask me to prioritise their work. Stand in line buddy. I have six other customers who think their project is the most important thing going, and a bunch of other customers who really do have important projects with deadlines but patiently wait their turn while impatient little snowflakes like you keep jumping the queue.

      When I need something done

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by prefec2 ( 875483 )

      Your outlined procedure is reasonable. And it is correct to escalate. Actually, it would have made more sense on your side to escalate much earlier. As this is a short script of an imaginary email conversation, I assume that you set a time limit in your first request. "We use your component and your changes Y hinder us to reach our goal X. [...] We need a solution to this problem by today+7 and a solution strategy by tomorrow. If it is improbable to solve the issue to our needs we need to escalate this acco

    • Allow me to fisk your first approach:

      You: Hello. My project is using your project to achieve goal X, and we noticed that you are doing Y which causes problems for our task and probably others too. Y does not seem to work properly. We cannot make progress until this issue is resolved. Perhaps a better way to do things would be Z, but I didn't see any discussion of it in your documents - have you considered that approach before?

      1) "and probably others too" - You have just shown that you are going to make sp

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        No, you did.

        If there was a process and due diligence followed to provide the solution, the respondent could show the evidence for (1) and (2) automatically, cutting the OP's feet from under him. In the absence of evidence, it's not unreasonable to assume that your current group and others you may be familiar with will have the same issue, particularly if you're plugged in enough to know for a fact they do , in which case you are using probably to avoid speaking for them,.

        (3) is ransom. That's how it works -

  • I eat mean people.
    It saves trouble.

  • Other things that can seriously affect you. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    There are other things that can make your life worse off, even though it might not seemingly cause any harm at all.

    Feelings of negativity lead to negative health issues, namely being subjected to annoying, boring or outright enraging activities.
    "Cringe-watching", the act of watching something you hate so much just to see how awful it is, has even been linked to health issues pretty damn well despite being a recent-ish thing.
    But it just follows the same principle of being in a negative environment and having

  • 38% increased risk of cardiovascular event.

  • Looks like the places I have worked in USA must be very much off the norm. Grad school, followed by a small company founded by a professor and his two grad students... Very relaxed atmosphere, never heard any raised voices or snide comments behind the back belittling anyone. Very international workforce. Most arguments will take the form of "Can you prove your algo will terminate?" "It will take longer to prove, easier to code it up and test" "Engineers! blah, you will get a few test cases working and you w
    • You are lucky. I work in research. We compete with each other for grant money, co-authership, and basically everything else. When someone gets funded, and others need money, then the person with money can hire and exploit the ones who need money. When that money runs out and someone else gets funded, tables turn and it's payback time. Publishing more than your supervisor? Expect to get jerked around with useless tasks so you don't have time to write, then get a bad performance review because you didn't comp
      • Very different from my experience definitely. I am not in the publish or perish race. Commercial software development of design analysis tools. Finite elements, finite difference, mesh generation, strong architecture for managing large number of simulations form our core competency. Very clear metrics on performance. Your code works, or it does not. It solves customer's problem, or it does not. Tilll we were acquired by a bigger company we would rather ship a feature rather than delaying it to file for pate

  • In [another] study, the experimenter belittled the peer group of the participants, who then...came up with 39 percent fewer creative ideas during a brainstorming task focused on how they might use a brick.

    I have an idea what to do with the brick...

  • Maybe (Score:1)

    by koan ( 80826 )

    That's a reason women tend to live longer than men, because historically they haven't been in the "workforce".

  • Perhaps this is why some places are better to live (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gonoff ( 88518 ) on Sunday June 21, 2015 @11:36AM (#49956805)

    Something that has been in the news a few times is how some places are better to live than others.
    I regularly see people from the USA strongly disputing this. How can anywhere possibly be better to live than the US? You have your Constitution, various amendments and some of you have a lot of money.

    If this is right, perhaps it is to do with manners. So often your countryfolk seem brusque at best and just plain rude a lot of the time. This is definitely not all of you and not everyone in Denmark and Bhutan are amazingly polite at all times. What is evident though is that rudeness can be taken as a badge of honour in some places. In others politeness is seen as the target.

    Example: A couple of years ago, I was taking part in a discussion about the treatment of transgender people. My attitude is that if someone has gone through all "that process", it is just good manners to call them what they want to be. This was taken by some that I am somewhere in the LGBTIQ... spectrum. I'm not. I'm straight white Northern European but also a (usually) polite Brit.

    It would be interesting to compare where is supposed to be good and bad places to live with their local norms of politeness.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by chihowa ( 366380 )

      Perhaps a huge component of "politeness" is the ability to personally identify with the people around you in a significant way. Most of Northern Europe has a remarkable cultural homogeneity. Denmark, for example, is occupied by around 90% people of Danish descent [wikipedia.org], and even the 10% is a relatively recent phenomenon. Even the religion of Denmark is homogeneous, with the census reporting 80% belonging to Church of Denmark. The rest of Northern Europe is similarly homogeneous, even including the UK.

      So often your countryfolk seem brusque at best and just plain rude a lot of the time.

      The rudest p

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The rudest people I've ever met in my life have all been European. I'm a very polite person, so I presume it's because they knew that I was American and were unable to stir up any empathy for somebody so culturally different and "other". Perhaps it isn't valid to take your trans-cultural interaction as an accurate representation of intra-cultural interactions.

        Yep. I traveled from St Petersburg back to Canada through Frankfurt. Frankfurt Airport was barely distinguishable from St Petersburg manners-wise. Canada was night and day (I live there). Flying there through Zurich was nice. Visiting the US (NY, Detroit, LA) was quite nice. So yeah, politeness points for North America, honourable mention for Switzerland. Purely anecdotal of course.

    • I completely disagree that politeness is more important than technical correctness. If I know that somebody was born a male and used modern technology to turn into w female looking person ai still consider that person a male and will not change my definition of them for their sake. It is just not going to happen. I don't mean to be in their face, I believe in live and let live to this absolute. But I will not change nomenclature for anybody's sake.

      • You're not being technically correct, you're just being a dick. There's nothing technically correct about calling someone transgender by the pronoun they've gone away from. Unlike actual technical correctness it doesn't achieve anything at all.

        I knew a friend of mine for about 10 years before I knew she was transgender. I can tell you if I started referring to her as "he" it would have confused a whole hell of a lot of people. But in your world apparently that's OK, because people pronouns should be chosen

        • Being a dick is my right, first and foremost, but like I said: live and let live. As to the question at hand: you are born in a male body and have to cut off your junk and do other procedure to appear as if you are female, afaic you are still a male. You are fucked up, but male.

          • Being a dick is my right, first and foremost,

            Sure, being a dick is not literally illegal, I never claimed it was. And my not-literally-illegal-to-say-so right is to call you out for being a dick.

            You dick.

            As to the question at hand:

            No, you completely ignored the question at hand because you didn't like the answer it would have forced you to give.

            • Where did you force me to do anything at all? I don't care about your friend and I don't bother anybody and they shouldn't bother me. There are males who look female, that's nothing new. They are still men regardless of their broken hormone system.

              • Where did you force me to do anything at all?

                I didn't force you to do anything, and apparently I didn't force you to read my post. To give a sane and coherent answer would have forced you to actually think about what you're saying.

                You can't be aresd though which is why you're not answering my question.

                I don't care about your friend and I don't bother anybody and they shouldn't bother me.

                You care enough to (in the hypothetical case) switch from calling her "her" to "him".

                There are males who look female, tha

  • Jesus had this science figured out 2000 years ago (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bjdevil66 ( 583941 ) on Sunday June 21, 2015 @11:40AM (#49956831)

    And it's not like the "research paper" (i.e. the New Testament) has been lost to history, like so much other scientific data gets lost. Flawed as it is due to translation errors and redaction, "love one another" and "treat thy neighbor as thyself" hold up pretty well in 2015 AD as well as it did in 1,000,000 BC.

    And it's not like he is the only in recorded history or philosophy saying this.

    I guess my point is that while it's interesting to have actual data confirming the correlation between office environment and productivity is good to have, we already knew this to be true. Why are funds being wasted on such when there are so many gaping fiscal wounds in the world of education to be filled?

    • I'm curious: The bible recognizes, accepts, and at places condones slavery. What would Jesus have said about this subject? Also, should we take direction from the bible on this issue?

      Also: Jesus himself got angry and tore up the bazaar in the temple. I'm trying to be like Jesus in all ways (not making that up), and I'm wondering if it's OK to do that? Is getting angry on occasion, and doing damage to public areas OK for the informed activist?

      And finally: What does the bible have to say about homosexuality?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I'm curious: The bible recognizes, accepts, and at places condones slavery. What would Jesus have said about this subject? Also, should we take direction from the bible on this issue?

        Debt slavery with a six year maximum term.
        Exodus 21:1-3
        "1 Now these are the rules that you shall set before them. 2 When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. 3 If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. "
        Example of doing the wrong thing : Jeremiah 34:10-11
        Example of doing the right thing: 2 Chronicles 28:8-15.

        Enslaving war prisoners (which is the kind of slavery I assume you're

  • Crucial for Retention as Well (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Not too long ago, a company spent US$100K or more to hire me and move me across the country to work for them. It was on a project I really believed in and wanted to make a serious contribution to. Unfortunately, my supervisor turned out to be a jerk, lacking in basic civility, and as soon as I could, I moved on. In principle, that company should be appalled, but in practice, they have no real monitoring to detect this sort of thing (and I'm certainly not going to tell them).

    These days, when it comes to h

  • Not sure where I heard it, but it's stuck with me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by andrewbaldwin ( 442273 ) on Sunday June 21, 2015 @12:12PM (#49956987)

    "Words like 'please' and 'thank-you' are like the air in your bicycle tyres -- they cost nothing but make your journey through life much smoother"

    I recall being singled out by the leader on a training course many years ago where we had to role play asking someone to do extra work when there was no direct management chain of command -- i.e. persuasion rather than authority. In a room of about 30 people I was the only one who said 'please' during the request and 'thank-you' at the end. I don't think the others were necessarily rude or lacking civility - but that, at the time, 'macho demanding' was all the rage when it came to management.

    Honestly - how hard is it to be polite?

  • I've also read about how a person who is harboring negative emotions, but never lets them go and tries to pretend to be cheerful can also become stressed. Having very few outlets for social stress can be bad as well, the stresses don't just come from someone else being a little rude. Social interactions are complex things, and I would know considering my level of introversion. Two sides often exist in any scenario.

    This isn't to say I think it's perfectly fine to be an asshole all the time for very little re

  • Perhaps many people get subtly (or not-so-subtly) rubbed the wrong way by inhumane aspects of modern society/technology/the world of work & business, & it builds up, & many incidentally just dispel the discomfiture & such by lashing out at those around them, be it jokingly, passive aggressively, or outright abusive language/behavior. It sure takes a lot of metacognition (& meta-metacognition ("mindfulness"?)) to keep a handle on that sort of phenomenon & in the process (hopefully) ta
  • I have seen two stress generators in play at various jobs. One huge cause is when a company has economic wars and can not afford to pay the going rate for workers who really are productive. Employees tend to turn on each other as if one getting ahead decreases the others' chances of ever getting a raise. It can reach the point of employees destroying the work of other employees to make them look bad to management. The second cause of note occurs in jobs that are reliable and lasting

  • "In [another] study, the experimenter belittled the peer group of the participants, who then performed 33 percent worse on anagram word puzzles and came up with 39 percent fewer creative ideas during a brainstorming task focused on how they might use a brick."

    Maybe they were just thinking too hard about using the brick on the experimenter to come up with other uses.

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