This is him brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Parents, at least on a certain era, use it like kids. If you can't see anything nice, don't see anything at all. Such advice might seem quaint today.
No matter where we look, it can feel as if we're living in a time of mounting instability. Smartphones and social media amplify this way. It used to be that when two people got into an argument in a parking lot or on an airplane, only a few people heard it. But today, thousands of people witnessed rule interactions among people they never meet.
It's become the stuff of viral videos and memes. We're not talking to you. We're not talking to you. We're not talking to people that work here.
Get out of my face. We often tell ourselves to ignore insults and sluts. It's not called to an experiment show that this is not easy to do, and that rudeness has a long lasting, malevolent power. We're flooded with emotions, and that's when this fight or flight to gear kicks in.
One way that I think about this is the storm inside your brain. The surprising effect of disability and how to protect yourself from its toxic influence this week on hidden brain. Hey, I was supposed to take over the parts of the job you hate. Turns out, we made your job even harder.
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To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Rudeness and instability seem to be showing up everywhere these days on airplanes and supermarket miles in restaurants. What effect does this time of nastiness have on all of us? According to the old adage, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
What is this really true? At Georgetown University, behavioral scientists Christine Porath study the effects of instability on our communities, our careers, even our capacity for creativity. Christine Porath welcome to hidden brain. Thanks for having me.
I want to start by having you tell me about a moment in your own life Christine, where you saw the effects of instability firsthand. You were still a student in college when you received word that your dad was in the hospital. Can you describe the scene for me when you got there? Well, I remember vividly walking up to the hospital room and being in the doorway and seeing him lying there in the hospital bed with a lecture strapped his bare chest.
And it was shocking for me to see him like that because he was an otherwise very strong, by the age of athletic eye. And I had never envisioned something like that happening to him. Why was he in the hospital? Well, he had had a heart attack and it stemmed from working for a very toxic loss.
He'd actually worked for two toxic losses for over the course of a decade. And it was really coming to a breaking point. And it wasn't until I thought a decade later or more that he shared some of the particulars and really spoke openly about that. And the truth was it was painful for him to relive that stuff.
Christine's father was a salesman. His boss would insult staff members of meetings and blame them for things beyond their control. He even belittled clients. During a visit to a client store, my dad heard his boss tell the owner, I see you're carrying on your father's tradition.
The store looked like shit then and it looks like shit in your hands. The idea of people being put on the spot was something in a meeting. You know, you don't know what you're doing here. Screaming certainly to place, which I would say like crosses the line of what I tend to study.
So some years ago, you were working at your first job. It was a sports academy of Florida. And it's been a place only one morning before work at a company gym. Can you pick up each of what happened?
My friend who ran the performance institute, he would open it up early for us to work out before the gym was open to athletes. And he would have music playing in the background kind of energetic workout music. And we'd all be doing our thing on the treadmills and some more looking weights. And ironically, the person whose name was on the sports agency showed up.
And oftentimes he was out of town traveling the world. So this was unexpected. And he just started screaming at the performance manager, you know, saying, you know that I love very white. Why isn't my music playing?
So, you know, my friend went in the back and changed the music to a very white. And then we all kind of put our heads down and people's minds were swirling a little bit in terms of what they had just witnessed and why that happened and what did that mean for them during the day. But the biggest thing I think was just the way that it affected people's emotions and moods and they weren't themselves. Like they didn't bring the same energy to the athletes or the customers or the people that they were dealing with that day.
I want to talk about one of the story that we feel like it would be directly on the receiving end of disability. Some years after you left the sports academy in Florida, you became an academic. You were doing a professor at a school. And you had an encounter with a senior professor at a holiday party.
Can you tell me what happened? We were talking kind of over in the corner and he said that he thought my book had a stupid thing title. And, you know, I didn't really know what to say and response to that. I just kind of took it, but I really just wanted to escape the situation.
And I certainly didn't ask for his opinion about the title. So it really took me off track because I remember, you know, days afterwards, kind of sitting in my office, staring at the computer screen and just thinking about that. And what it meant for the prospects of my career because I was over 10 year. And our profession, that means like you're up or out, you either have a job or you're going to lose that job and need to root yourself in your whole life from that place.
So, you know, I felt like I had a lot riding on it. And given that he had a lot of power and status and everything else, I just wondered what that meant for me in my future. I'm wondering how you became around the senior professor. You must have bumped into him in the hallways or past him at meetings.
And you're behaving how you're attracted with him going forward? Yeah, definitely change my behavior. I really tried to avoid him and work with my office or clothes. I really almost like time when I would go to the bathroom to avoid people.
I think that I kind of became a shell of myself around him and other people. So that's single moment of disability state with you for a long time. And it makes me think about the long term effects of all the rudeness we see around us. It does seem as though there has been an increase in instability.
Perhaps as the COVID pandemic has worn us all down. In January 2022, a customer at a smoothie shop in Fairfield, Connecticut received the wrong drink. He came to contain peanut butter. And he said his son had a allergic reaction and needed to be hospitalized.
The man confronted two young employees at a smoothie shop calling one of them an immigrant loser. The exchange was quite disturbing here when viral on social media. Of course, you could be hearing about incidents like this because of social media. But it does feel like almost every other week brings a new example of people simply losing it.
Do you think there is more instability around us? I do, unfortunately. And our other research would suggest that. The number one reason for insubility is that people feel stressed or overwhelmed.
I think that, you know, unfortunately, the kind of negativity even around, you know, the pandemic around politics around uncertainty leads us to feel more stressed. And as a reason that at least people say caused their rudeness or responding negatively in moments like those. Health care systems, in particular, it's just terrible these days. And CEOs of hospitals, some of them have reached out to me and said, do you know how bad it is right now?
And I think just like this clip, the loots do. A lot of this is mixed with racism and politics. So they are on the front lines of getting this. And it's just become really, really hard for them.
When we come back, the surprising powerful effects that insubility has on our brains. And what we can do about it. You listen to the hidden brain. I'm stronger than that.
This is hidden brain. I'm stronger than that. If you recently had a stand in the long line of the airport, or waited for a bus that never showed up, or had to deal with an incompetent customer service rep in a call center. You may have felt a rising level of limitations.
You may have taken all your effort to keep your frustrations on control. Many of us can think of situations where we lost it. Or where we saw others lose their coo. Social media is full of videos showing people screaming each other in stores, in restaurants, and in workplaces.
And Georgetown University behavioral scientists Christine Poret studies the effects of this tide of insubility. When you were in high school, you played on a boy soccer team, and I understand at the time, you found the best way to deal with rudeness was just to shake it off. Yeah, well, I think just coming from that background, it's the idea that you should be strong and rise above it and just power through. And so, you know, we're shaped by your background and our experiences.
And so, you know, that's what I brought to the table. And especially when it came to me, and those that I was close to, it was like, come on, suck it up, or just rise above it, get over it. But definitely playing boys high school soccer, you know, I did stand out. Even had the long coming tail now.
And so, in some ways, I felt tested that I definitely should be strong and hold my own within that environment. So, we discussed how senior colleagues at the Barrow School of Public Health, you found the heart lasted a very long time. And you yourself were studying the phenomenon of insubility, along with your colleague Christine Poret, and you asked people about their experiences with rudeness and insubility. What do people tell you about the effects of mistreatment and saloon?
What we found is that it's stuck and was much more painful than we would have anticipated. I remember incidents like there was one person who had worked in a little league baseball concession stand. And, you know, he remembers being belittled afterwards. He actually had to go to the owner of this team's house and explain, you know, a mistake.
And got screamed at, and 17 years later he's writing about it and says he thinks about it. And so, those were the kind of things that stuck. I think we had someone report something from 1988 when they were, you know, sitting around a table with 12 peers and got, you know, treated in a way that they felt business and belittled. And so, you had people that were holding on to these experiences for not just, you know, months or years, but decades.
I want to examine both immediate effects of insubility on the mind, as well as some of these long-term effects that you're talking about. You see that insubility can hijack the amygdala. What do you mean by this question? Well, I think it means that we're flooded with emotions.
And that's when kind of this idea of fight or flight to gear kicks in. And it leads us for many people being paralyzed almost in terms of not being able to respond to things or not being able to react or making changes that would help us in that moment. Like, it's almost as if we can't cope with the situation because we're struggling to process things. And so, you know, one way that I think about this is like the storm inside your brain.
Christine's conducted many studies into the effects of insubility. One of them builds on female psychological experiment. Volunteers are asked to watch a video of people rapidly passing basketball. Right in the middle of the game, a person wearing a gorilla suit walks through the middle of the frame.
Many volunteers fail to notice the gorilla because they're still focused on the ball being passed. And Christine's experiment, she knows a subset of volunteers to insubility before they watch the video. And they were five times less likely to see the gorilla on the screen. And that really surprised us.
But also with other studies, what we found is that it took people a lot longer to answer questions to solve the integrums. We're jumbles to create words. They have a much more difficulty doing that kind of thing. So cognitive performance went down significantly, roughly about 30% across different studies.
And even their physical moves to answer questions, that was slower. So it seemed to be affecting people in all sorts of ways. And what's interesting also is that people weren't aware of this. There's been some work that you and others have done looking at the effects of insubility on memory.
What do you find? We find that when people are witness, they are far less likely to be able to remember things. So they make a lot more errors. We measured this with math errors.
We measured this with performance errors on cognitive tests. And the differences were really stunning with just seeing this or being around it. You even found that insubility has effects on our creativity, which I'm really surprising. What do you find Christine?
Yeah, we find again whether you experience insubility, whether you witness it decreases your ability to come up with creative ideas. So in some of the tests, we give them the study where they come up with as many ideas for what to do with the brick as possible. And we code it for dysfunctional ideas as well as like how creative the ideas are. And what we find is the people that were exposed to rudeness, they come up with really dysfunctional responses for what you do with a brick.
Like they'll say things like bricks on the nose, smash someone fingers, beat a crush person to death, sync about in a river, throw it through a window, place it on the floor to stop people's toe or something like that. It almost seems as if people are coming up with creative use for the brick that has somewhat aggressive. Yeah, scary aggressive. And it was just stunning to see the ideas that people came up with.
Because really all that they were exposed to was just one quick incident. It was like a fleeting moment that they were exposed to. And somehow this is what they came up with. Why do you think rudeness has these effects on creativity?
Both in some ways limiting how creative we can be, but also perhaps exacerbating this kind of aggressive creativity? I think it ties to the hijacking people's focus and attention and the lack of awareness around that. People become much more self-focused, much less other focused. And I think our mind is wrapped up on replaying the incident where they're not focusing on the task nearly as much.
They're overwhelmed by other thoughts. And so it's very hard to think about anything else. Yeah. We've got to tell the fact of disability at the level of personal psychology, but you found that disability also affects organizational functioning.
Can you tell me how rudeness affects loyalty and commitment to what is? When people are around cultures where rudeness is prevalence, they're much less likely to want to stick around. So 12% of people who experienced instability say that they changed jobs as a result of that experience. But also I think that what we saw is customers that witness this kind of behavior even among, you know, an employee acting really to another employee.
They were far less likely to want to use that restaurant or that bank. And they were far less loyal to the brand moving forward. When disability is present, people who work together are also less likely to trust one another. Can you talk about this idea, the effects of rudeness or trust?
When you see rudeness, we tend to think, you know, really negative thoughts about that person. I think in many cases we question their character and their integrity. Like we generalize to a lot of different negative traits because of that one incident. And so, you know, that really hurts that person.
Then I think we also, you know, tend to become less trusting in our own environment. Like for example, we're less likely to speak up in a meeting. Maybe even when that person is in present because it kind of has shut us down. And we operate much more from a place of fear.
We don't offer our ideas. We don't speak up about errors or potential mistakes because we're afraid of the push-back on us. Now, rudeness and such consequences for us can have downstream consequences about other people. The psychologist amino cells found that instability can affect the performance of medical professionals.
Can you describe what he's on? Yeah, well, one of the studies that I love that they did was surgical teams in Israel that were exposed to rudeness. Meaning they overheard that they were not doing a procedure well enough. Those medical teams performed worse on all other diagnostics and all of the procedures they did.
And they found that this was mainly because they stopped sharing information as much. And they stopped seeking help from these people on their teams, performing the surgery. And so they found that even watching someone else get treated badly, reduced the ability of some of these medical professionals who think flexible about patient condition. Yeah, and so that's some of their recent research that shows that they get anchored almost on an idea.
And when they've been exposed to rudeness, they have a really hard time pivoting to consider anything else. So it almost is this idea of lack of creativity. You know, they can't even be open to any new information because they're stuck. And so moving forward and performing well considering other ideas that they're just not capable of.
What strikes me through the example you're giving about this study here in Israel. You know, suggests that they're downstream effects of incident and rudeness. It's not just that people within the workplace are affected, but the people now who are coming in contact with the workplace. And so, you know, in fact, the patients are hospital.
It seems that rudeness can have these filing effects on larger and larger numbers of people. One of the reasons I went into setting this is because I felt like not only colored people's work lives, but they took it home with them. It affected the personalized as well. People just, they became a smaller version of themselves.
They became probably more frustrated, more angry, more depressed. And so like, you know, in fact, the personal relationships in really important ways. So it definitely does flow through social networks and spreads in very powerful ways. You know, Christine, we've seen YouTube and Twitter and Facebook are full examples of moments that have gone viral where people have behaved really in their behaviors, their actions, their words are basically spread, far and wider in their net.
But I think what you're saying is that there's a different kind of variety that rudeness and disability can have downstream effects on the people who witness that instability and then fully downstream effects on other people who become in contact with. Yeah, that's what we find in our research is, but within the workplace as well outside of it, when you witness instability, you pass it forward. And so if you're seeing it anywhere online on the media, you will likely become a carrier of this virus and pass it forward with whoever you come in contact with. And a lot of that is unintentional.
When we come back, is there a way to put the genie back in the bottle? You're listening to the hidden brain. I'm stronger than that. This is hidden brain.
I'm stronger than that. The hero scientist Christine Portard studies disability. She's sounded as powerful and long-lasting effects on our thinking, on our emotions and on our wellbeing. Although it's difficult to get precise numbers on this, it's hard to escape the feeling that instability is on the rise.
What can we do about it? When people treat us rudely, our first impulse might be to respond in kind. But Christine says it's a good idea to reflect that at least sometimes rudeness can be unintentional. When we ask why people are rude, only 4% said because it's fun and they get away with it, I think the vast majority of people have no idea that what they're doing is hurting people or making them feel small in some way.
And so I believe it stems from a lack of self-awareness. In her work with groups and organizations, Christine sometimes draws on an old idea from psychology, the Johari window. The psychologist Joseph left and her in the kingdom divided a square into quadrants like a four-pained window. One thing represents things we know about ourselves that others know as well.
A second looks at secrets, things that we know about ourselves that others do not know. Another looks at the element of ourselves that are unknown both to us and to others. Christine focuses on a final thing. Things that others know about us that we don't know about ourselves.
The Johari window is really this idea of what we know about ourselves, what we do not know about ourselves, what others know about us and what others do not know about us. And so we're really trying to uncover our blind spots around what's known to others but is not known to ourselves because these blind spots are really what's affecting how we're behaving in ways that are often hurtful to others. You've collaborated with the organization psychologist, Joshua Jurek, and she studies how self-aware people are. So how self-aware are people?
I mean, relative to how self-aware they think they are. Yeah, not very self-aware. So she has not at all, that's a huge gap. So she has found that 95% of people believe that they're self-aware.
We have a good sense of our strengths and how we're perceived. However, she has found that only 10 to 15% of people actually are self-aware. And so 80% of us are fooling ourselves on any given day about what people think about us. And we tend to bias at all in the positive direction.
Marshall Goldsmith who coaches a lot of leaders and he talks about this idea of we like to play a highlight reel of our successes in our minds. And so we kind of anchor in on the positives and how we affect others. We are blind spots are usually on the negatives and how we're affecting people in harmful ways or ways that may even hurt us. I understand that you want to encounter with a friend who revealed to you something about your own behavior that you were not aware of.
What did you tell you about your conversational style? So if you told me that I had a tendency to interrupt or to jump in when someone else was speaking, and that was something that I didn't realize that I did. So if there was a pregnant pause in our conversation, I was happy to help them along, finish a thoughts or insert my question. And so when I got the seat back, I was really surprised.
I did feel like there was any truth to it. It did. And the fact I think the funny thing was, is he was telling me this. He was already to jump in with the why.
We're tenting, laughing, and me laughing. And if there was any doubt that was cleared up right away in a moment. Christine talked earlier about the educated coach, Marshall Goldsmith. He was a pioneer in what's called 360 degree feedback.
It's a structured system some leaders have used to solicit opinions of a wide range of colleagues and subordinates. As it turns out, even people who teach others to overcome their blind spots have blind spots of their own. So he actually collected 360 degree feedback, like a salting firm, he ran. And he has a reputation for being a great guy and a giver.
And so he was really upset by the fact that the feedback he got was he had a tendency to talk badly about people behind their backs. And he felt terrible, but he also couldn't think of any time where he had done this. And so he challenged his employees. He said $10 and he called me out on this.
On day one, he said he was down $50 by lunchtime. And he locked himself in his office and decided nothing up, you know, no more for today. And then he said he improved, you know, it was $30 and then $10. And so his point was not that we have to put a tax on our own behavior.
But even the leading coaching guru that came up with 360 feedback and everything, you know, he wasn't aware of behaviors that he certainly wasn't proud of. I mean, it was the opposite of the effect that he wanted to have. And yet he was completely unaware. He couldn't think of a time where he had done it.
So it even showed that we need the help of others to try to uncover some of this awareness for us so that we can improve. The research of Joshua, Ms. Nore, at North Idaho College has another idea on how you can increase the amount of feedback that you get. And his idea has not been taken and has been used by organizational psychologists.
Tell me about the dinner of truth. So the dinner of truth is that you ask a friend or a colleague out for dinner and you ask them, you know, what's one of the most annoying habits that I have. What is something that I do that hurts me or you or leads to my effectiveness. And that really you sit there and you take the feedback and you use it to move you forward.
And although people like Tasha Irk have told me that they thought I'm not going to get real feedback from this friend. That in fact they get super valuable feedback and it's a way to move them forward. But you know, it's not easy to do and it's a lot of people are fearful of what they might hear. I want to tell you a little bit about how we might respond to instability that directed at us.
How we can keep it from hijacking our bodies and our minds. As we've seen confronting rudeness with rudeness doesn't seem like a very good solution of what is in the perpetrator of rudeness often doesn't work very well. Usually the one alternative is to change your own frame and to focus on the future. What do you mean by this?
Well, I think it's important that you control what you can control. And usually that means just yourself. And the research shows we found that the one antidote to instability is a sense of thriving. Like a sense of feeling like you're moving forward.
And so it's about getting unstuck. And for a lot of people it's focusing on taking care of themselves. Like for example exercising or something like that. What you want to do is you want to do something that builds hope that helps you focus on moving forward in a positive way, not getting dragged down about your past.
The other aspect is a sense of vitality or energy. And so there are lots of ways to potentially achieve this. It could be activities like getting involved in your community, coaching, volunteering, choosing something that makes you feel smarter or stronger and more interesting. That really clears your mind or feeds your soul.
And we talked about a lot about instability as a virus. And your defense really depends to a large extent on your ability to manage your energy. And my research suggests that many of the factors that help prevent illness, like good nutrition and sleep stress management, can also help ward off insibilities and not just effects. So in some ways just stick with disease and energy.
What I think I hear you say is it can be confronted by a virus. You have to go looking for the antidote to the virus. But perhaps the better solutions are just how strong it is. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And there are ways that we can do that, including even building positive relationships inside or outside of work. Or if this happens to your work, we encourage people to focus on driving outside of work. You know, because by doing things that make you feel good outside of the workplace, you actually bring a stronger and more resilient self inside the workplace. So I think that's helpful.
I understand that you're working with nurses to teach them strategies to thrive. Many nurses support dealing with a significant amount of instability and rudeness in the workplace, especially perhaps during the COVID-19 pandemic. There have been Asian American nurses who have been attacked by patients about bringing the virus from China and nurses reporting regularly receiving end of battery, different physicians. This might be the work that you're doing with nurses and the effects that you're finding it has.
So one of the things that we're coaching them on that we've seen evidence and experiments that by what the co-self distancing. So this idea of kind of pulling back out of the moment and it's almost like, you know, asking someone to step out and watch the scene as a movie unfolding. So trying to take a step back from the event and trying to get a better and bigger picture perspective on it. So for example, one way you can do this is ask, okay, in five years, what kind of a fat business can have on you.
So we found that self distancing makes people more objective and less emotionally involved in the encounter. And this can help individuals find better solutions in the moment and moving forward. So if they have the capability to distance themselves from this stressor, let's say this route encounter, they're able to, let's say, you know, serve the patient better in the moment or come back to the patient more quickly, you know, without, you know, kind of taking it out on them. Or just being really wrapped up in what to make of this situation.
We talked earlier about how when you experience disability, you often found it hard to set that it set it aside and to basically focus on other things. And some ways, disability and rudeness can hijack the mind and make it very difficult to focus on other things. And so unsurprisingly, people who experience rudeness end up, you know, persevering on the thing that happened on the route thing that happened on the route thing that was set to them. And partly I think what you're suggesting is actually so hard because what you're saying is that that kind of perseveration in fact is not useful if that is not helpful.
Yeah, I think it is extremely challenging to get that advice, but it leads to a lot better results in the case of nurses, you know, when patients safety as a risk, I think it's imperative that they find coping strategies so that they can attend people, you know, in a way, that doesn't take them off track, especially for long periods of time. So we're trying to find interventions or things that help them not only cope with it, but recover quickly and move them forward. I mean, I also think that that idea of arriving is really crucial for them because they've been under such challenging circumstances and strain for a long time that it's really important that they take care of themselves. You know, just coming in is physically ready as possible because, you know, it's going to help them be able to regulate and respond best to anything that they may deal with that day.
I'm wondering if people push back on you when you give them this advice because I suspect that many people who have experienced disability see justice more than anything else. And I actually want the one the wrong door to make a man's and you're telling them the best way to deal with this really is to not be an attention to it and move on with your day to try and find other things in your life that you're engaged with that make you happy. Do people respond to that advice well, Christine? You know, generally, I think they do.
The nice thing is you're betting on yourself and not betting on someone else changing and it's the vast majority of these situations at work, even if they told the organization the organization acted on that, which is rare. You know, it still isn't likely that that person's gonna change completely. And so really what you're asking them is to focus on themselves and bet on themselves in their future. And at least for myself, like I like that.
That's because, you know, that gives me some power in an otherwise really disempowering situation. I want to look at some complexities when it comes to instability. You've written what matters is not whether people actually were disrespected or treated in sensitivity, but whether they felt disrespected, disability is in the eyes of the recipient. Now I think the virtue of taking people's concerns about disability seriously, but I can also see some people saying, hang on a minute, if each person can decide for themselves what is rude, what is not rude, how do we come to a shared understanding of instability?
I mean, so someone was from a very polite culture, you know, let's say from the US South, could come to a place like New York City and say, you know, everyone in the town is rude. Yeah, it's what makes it really tricky. And that's why providing information to people about how things are affecting you. At least if that's the one you work with regularly is helpful, but I mean the US is such a big place.
And there are such differences behind how we communicate. And then certainly if you think about globally. So I think that's what makes it so challenging. Having worked with some firms like the UN or International Monetary Fund where they have employees from 183 countries.
I mean, that makes it really tough to come up with norms for communicating or how we treat each other. So something like a guy that's given us an incident that took place on a Delta Airlines flight between Tampa and Atlanta. A man who went to a fight. It started when the woman was told she'd have to wait for the beverage car to move before she could take her seat.
And then quickly escalated to a fight about whether to wear face masks. Soon insults flying back and forth, and eventually the woman took a fight. What was talking about this blip-ristan is that both parties seem to feel like a victim of instability. So if I think that wearing a mask saves lives during a pandemic, I can see you're refusing to wear a mask as a height of rudeness.
And if you think wearing a mask is not necessary, you can see me as being an obnoxious, you know, busy body. Is it possible that many confrontations both parties feel like they're victims of instability? Yes, because we made lack of awareness or simply disagree with whatever we did that they got with rude. There's definitely a likelihood of misperceptions.
And I think a lot of times it happens even more so over-email. Because over-email you don't have a person's tone or they're non-verbals. And so I think that there's a lot of misunderstandings where you assume that someone may be being rude. And so then it kind of gets in a negative spiral when in fact some of it could have stemmed from a misunderstanding.
I'm wondering if there's a bit of a contradiction here. But on the one hand, I think we want to take people seriously and say, I'm really feeling like I have been treated badly. You don't want to dismiss that. On the other hand, we're also saying that people are not very self-aware and not quite aware of what's happening in situations.
There seems to be a disconnect between those two things. How do we simultaneously accept people face value when they say I believe that I have been treated rudely? And also they can do a counter-baptit or not self-aware about the role that they have brought to the conversation like this in the two places on the plane. I think feedback is crucial.
Meaning if you're in a workplace, let's say, providing people feedback around how they're perceived and what the role is in an incident. Radical candor, I think you can create cultures where people are radically candid with each other. The saying is clear but kind. I think that that's a good thing to shoot for.
It doesn't solve the problem in the plane. But I think if communities or families, if we can come at it with that perspective, I hope that that's helpful. Otherwise, it just seems like we're stuck in a negative cycle. Some people might say perhaps we're sending the bar to high.
If we're worrying so much about how the things we're going to be saying are going to be misinterpreted or over interpreted by other people, it'll cause people to walk on Excel. So they'll be hesitant to say what's on their mind to speak there to actually offer feedback and counter-fashion into tell people what's going on to make jokes, to be casual. How do you respond to this? I feel like there's a delicate balance here between essentially suppressing how people talk and walk in the world.
And basically giving people a couple of lines should basically say and do whatever they feel like they do. Yeah, I think it is a tough balance to strike in reality. I think that if you can create this culture where there is care and concern for others, that idea of radical candor is so much easier and you don't get caught up worrying about or processing the intentions behind something, you just let it kind of roll off someone's back. You know, you just move forward.
And so I think the sweet spot is this idea of you care personally and you feel comfortable challenging directly. Because I think we want that feedback. I don't think we want to sugarcoat things. I don't think we want a situation where we're afraid to tell the truth or to speak up about potential issues.
I think we've got to create these environments where people feel a sense of trust and respect, you know, where they feel what's called psychologically safe. And that's where the magic can really happen. That people can be their most productive, creative, helpful, healthy selves. We've looked at a lot of downsides of instability, but as I was reading your work, I was wondering, do you ever think we should make exceptions for instability in some cases?
I remember the famous line, you know, well-behaved women seldom make history. And the truth is that there are many activists in many causes who have behaved in ways that their opponents might as well as rude. But in fact, we're not able to argue that they were on the right side of history. Yeah, I'm sure that there are examples of that.
I think that if you're strong in your convictions, then, you know, that is something that you have to weigh the potential costs of how you're going to be perceived and move forward in the best way possible. I also think that some of this comes back to like leading authentically. And so, you know, some people are considered rude when they definitely don't mean to be. So again, improving your self-awareness around that could lead to you being most effective.
But it's hard for me to kind of think about specific behaviors that I would say, oh, definitely never rude or always worth doing it that way. I think that probably you're best served by like weighing it in the moment and trying to explain yourself. I think, you know, some of the research that has struck me is if you preface negative feedback with something along the lines of, I care about you and I think you can do better. And people are far less defensive.
You know, they respond. I think it's 40% better to that. And I think that if you have planted the seeds and shown people that you care about them and that you tend to be respectful, then you're much less likely to be really hurt if they slip up from time to time or really hold it against them. And there are famous leaders that have apologized for such incidents and, you know, been forgiven by people because they feel like they have a pattern of treating people respectfully.
And the truth is, we also look up from time to time. But if we've invested in our relationships, usually these are things that we can recover from hopefully quickly and without too much effort. And it seems like very few people would argue with the idea that we all be better off if we could have more positive affirmative experiences and relationships. But I'm struck by one idea that you've advanced.
You've reached back to the work of an early 20th century scholar named Charles Horton Cooley. You find that he had an idea that is especially useful to think about in everything about instability. What was his argument? So he talked about the looking class self.
And the idea is that it explains that we use others expressions like smiles or behaviors like acknowledging us and reactions like listening to us or insulting us to define ourselves. So how we believe others see us, shapes who we are. We ride away by pride or get swallowed in a sea of affairs and based on brief interactions that signal respect or disrespect individuals be valued and powerful when respected. So I believe that civility lives people, whereas instability holds people down.
It makes people feel small. And so we will be healthier, more productive, leave more fulfilling lives when we are civil that our communities will be healthier, more productive and more creative and you'll allow members to achieve their potential much more if they live and work in more respectful cultures where people can really thrive. Christine Porath is a behavioral scientist at Georgetown University. She's the author of the books, Mastering Civility, a manifesto for the workplace.
And with Christine Pearson, the cast of that behavior. Christine Porath, thank you for joining me today on hit and break. Thank you. Thank you.