Rudeness at work spreads like a virus

Dealing with rude behavior at work makes people more likely to perceive rudeness in later interactions, a new study shows. And that perception makes them more likely to be impolite in return, spreading rudeness like a virus.

“When you experience rudeness, it makes rudeness more noticeable,” says lead author Trevor Foulk, a doctoral student in management at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration. “You’ll see more rudeness even if it’s not there.”

The findings, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, provide the first evidence that everyday impoliteness spreads in the workplace. “Part of the problem is that we are generally tolerant of these behaviors, but they’re actually really harmful,” Foulk says. “Rudeness has an incredibly powerful negative effect on the workplace.”

The study tracked 90 graduate students practising negotiation with classmates. Those who rated their initial negotiation partner as rude were more likely to be rated as rude by a subsequent partner, showing that they passed along the first partner’s rudeness. The effect continued even when a week elapsed between the first and second negotiations.

Rudeness directed at others can also prime our brains to detect discourtesy. Foulk and his co-authors, fellow doctoral student Andrew Woolum and management professor Amir Erez, tested how quickly 47 undergraduate students could identify which words in a list were real and which were nonsense words.

Before the exercise began, participants observed one of two staged interactions between an apologetic late-arriving participant and the study leader. When the leader was rude to the latecomer, the participants identified rude words on the list as real words significantly faster than participants who had observed the neutral interaction.