Rudeness is not always judged equally, new research suggests—with people often more forgiving, or even supportive, of bad behavior when it is used in retaliation rather than as a provocation.
Scientists led from Cornell University found that observers view rude comments or actions more leniently when they are retaliatory, and in some cases even appreciate them as much as neutral responses to rudeness.
While the researchers are keen to stress that their findings do not endorse bad behavior, they note that they do highlight how context shapes judgments of incivility in ways that existing research has overlooked.
For years, research into rude behavior has focussed on how it harms morale and productivity and how it can trigger cycles of retaliation.
The new study—based on five experiments involving nearly 850 participants—examined a different question: how people go on to evaluate behavior once rudenss is already part of an interaction.
The results suggest that uncivil behavior is held to a lower standard, raising less eyebrows when it follows an initial violation of social norms rather than when it instigates one.
“People prefer retaliatory incivility to an instigator’s incivility, seeing it as more right, just and moral,” paper author and Cornell professor of organized behavior Merrick Osborne said in a statement.
“Although the degree of incivility is the same, we theorize that, in retaliation, it’s seen as helping to protect a group’s norms and establish to the instigator that they did something wrong.
“There’s more social value in being civil, but there can be social value in acting uncivilly, provided that it’s retaliatory.”
Across the experiments, participants consistently distinguished between rudeness that initiated conflict and rudeness that responded to it. The researchers found that retaliating to incivility was often seen as "justified," and sometimes even "admirable," compared with remaining neutral.
In one experiment, Reddit users were asked to imagine someone in a subreddit they frequented either making a rude or insulting comment or responding to such a comment with a similarly unsavory reply.
Participants rated retaliatory posters as significantly more worthy of status, agreeing more strongly with statements such as “I admire them more.” They were also more than seven times as likely to upvote an uncivil comment made in retaliation, boosting the poster’s “karma” on the platform.
Two further studies explored sports scenarios where retaliation could backfire by benefiting the opposing team. Hockey fans rated players on their favorite team as more "virtuous" if they punched an opposing player who had committed a violent penalty, compared with starting a fight without any provocation.
In a similar baseball scenario, fans supported their team’s pitcher hitting an opposing batter with a pitch—causing no serious injury—more when it followed an earlier hit-by-pitch to their own star hitter than when it occurred on its own.
In both cases, observers viewed the retaliatory acts as more "justified and admirable," even though they could lead to penalties that helped the other team win or get themselves in trouble.
A fourth experiment tested the limits of this approval. It found that incivility was only rewarded when it was directed at the original instigator. When a person responded to rudeness by “taking it out” on an unrelated third party, observers did not view the behavior positively.
The final study examined a workplace email exchange between members of a business team. One employee criticized a coworker’s report as “stupid” and full of “dumb errors.”
Participants rated a clear but civil response—“Please don’t say that. That’s not OK.”—most positively. However, a blunter reply, such as “shut up, no one wants to hear what you have to say,” was no more negatively judged than neutral responses.
Taken together, the findings suggest that how we perceive rudeness depends on what comes before it and proves that rude behavior is sometimes seen as the most noble thing to do—showing that, to some, two wrongs can make a right.
Source:Newsweek
Bd-pratidin English/ ANI
