People have long suspected that being rude to your coworkers spreads toxicity around (heck, there’s even an entire episode of How I Met Your Mother about it), but now there is proof, as a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that workplace rudeness is contagious.
The study followed 90 graduate students as they practiced multiple negotiations with their classmates. If a student’s first partner was rude, they were more likely to be rated as rude themselves by their second partner—showing that they had passed on the rudeness. And even after a week had passed between interactions, if the first partner was rude, the participant was still more likely to transfer that rudeness to their second.
However, you don’t need to have someone be rude directly to you to pass it on; just seeing someone else be rude is likely to do it as well. Forty-seven undergraduate students were shown either a video of a rude workplace interaction or a polite one, and were given the task of responding to a fictitious customer email of neutral tone. The students who saw the rude video were more likely to be hostile in their responses than those who saw the polite one.
“That tells us that rudeness will flavor the way you interpret ambiguous cues,” said lead author Trevor Foulk, a doctoral student in management at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration.
Taking rudeness more seriously
Rudeness doesn’t just spread like a virus; it attunes us to discourtesy. The 47 students were tasked with identifying which words on a list were real and fake. But before the students began, they witnessed a staged interaction between an apologetic late participant and the study leader. When the study leader was rude to the late “participant,” the students were more attentive to the rude words on the list, and identified them as real words significantly faster than those who saw a polite interaction.
“When you experience rudeness, it makes rudeness more noticeable,” Foulk said. “You’ll see more rudeness even if it’s not there.”
Foulk hopes the study will encourage employers to take rudeness more seriously.
“Part of the problem is that we are generally tolerant of these behaviors, but they’re actually really harmful,” Foulk said. “Rudeness has an incredibly powerful negative effect on the workplace.”
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