#38 Rudeness Contagion

Ep 38 Kindness - Rudeness Contagion
Welcome, I'm Arnold Bekus and I enable you to have a better life between the ears because your inner state creates your outer reality. Today I'm going to talk about the impact of rudeness and of course ending on a positive note the impact of kindness. Roy shared with me, Roy is my business partner, an interesting video about something called rudeness contagion.

What does it mean? It means that low-level rudeness doesn't just feel bad, that it spreads throughout our nervous system and organizations like a virus, changing how we perceive others and how we behave. That's quite an impact from being rude to someone else. So what were some of the key findings? That rudeness is a low-intensity virus.

Brief exposure to rude behavior, even a single episode, can make you more likely to feel later interactions as hostile and to respond more rudely yourself. So for instance someone has been rude to you, cut you off in the traffic, later on the impact is you might be rude to someone else. Second finding, anyone can become a carrier.

You don't have to be a rude person. After one rude encounter, even a kind conscious person can pass that rudeness on to the next person they meet, often without realizing it. Number three, it works by priming a hostility schema, meaning rudeness activates a mental threat file.

Once open, neutral faces and words start to look disrespectful. Your nervous system stays on guard and your behavior hardens, because you're threatened. Number four, second order impact is real.

The people who suffer most may not be a part of the original event. Like using the same traffic example, you get snapped in the traffic, you're shorter with a colleague and then that colleague is colder with a partner. So that rudeness contagion ripples through the social field and that creates finding number five, organization and health costs.

In workplaces this contagion undermines performance, collaboration and psychological safety. In hospitals and high stake environments, rudeness can impair decision-making. So just one simple act of rudeness, which you either experience or you do yourself, has an impact not only in that situation, but it has an impact way, way more than just that single event.

So that made me think, what about the flip side? What about kindness? Does that work in the same way? Well, unfortunately it does not. Yes, you can say that kindness is a kind of a flip side to rudeness and that it can spread contagiously, but the evidence suggests that it does not always spread as automatically or as strongly as rudeness. So rudeness and kindness are two sides of the same social contagion coin.

Each can spread through networks and shape the social nervous system. However, rudeness has a built-in advantage. It taps directly into threat vigilance, making it more likely to propagate unless people consciously regulate and interrupt it.

That's the same thing with fear and fear as opposed to aspiration, to your ambition, to your goal. Fear has already built in something like it triggers your nervous system into a fight-or-flight state. That's the same with rudeness.

It automatically triggers that nervous system and you pay attention and you react to that. Unfortunately, that is not the case with kindness. That's not the case with aspiration.

And that's why you need to even put more effort and you need to practice that. You need to have several positive interactions to counteract the impact of one negative interaction. And that is why habits of praise, appreciation and kindness are so important.

Well, important might not even be the right word. It is crucial to over-index on kindness, appreciation and positive micro signals. You need to have more.

You need to have more. If you have one situation like, oh, I had one thing I was rude today and it was one thing I was kind today, that levels out. No, it doesn't level out.

The rudeness wins. The rudeness is stronger, much, much stronger, actually. So you need, let's say, four or five acts of kindness to level out one act of rudeness.

That is why in each of these sessions, in each of these episodes, podcasts, I share this thing about moral beauty, about appreciation, kindness, positive influences. And it's not just, oh, hopefully this is the text I share in these podcasts. It's not the only positive thing in your life, but you need more.

You need much, much more of these kindness, appreciation and positive micro signals to counter the built-in threat of rudeness. Because otherwise, if you have one or two rudeness or negative experiences or fear-based things, just leveling it out and say, oh no, I listened to Arnold's podcast and that's enough. No, it's not enough.

It's just the start. You need to have more of these positive experiences and it's easy. It's easy to do.

But again, like everything in life, it needs practice and daily discipline. You need to do it every day. So that's why I include in this series an item called Everyday Beauty.

Because beauty and especially moral beauty like kindness, courage and compassion has a very positive influence on your inner state. I'm especially interested in what's happening in Uganda because I'm mentoring, training a group of young people to, well, to further their progress on the better for all collective. And this example is about Uganda's coffee farmers who just shrugged off a drought and regenerative agriculture is why.

The Masaka region in Uganda grows Robusta coffee, the variety used in espresso blends worldwide. When drought hit the region, farmers using conventional methods struggled. But a coalition of partners had spent years introducing regenerative practices to 30 model farms across the district.

And those farms held up. The practices were practical, well, interesting choice of words and unglamorous drought resistant seedling varieties, mulching to retain soil moisture, cover cropping and shade trees that could the microclimate and reduce water evaporation. The combined effect was that soil that behaved differently under stress, holding water longer and supporting root system better than adjacent conventional plots.

My coffee is stronger and more promising and so is my family, said Mari Fatuma, one of the participating farmers. Another farmer, Joseph added, we used to think erosion was just something we had to live with. They no longer do.

Please remember, we need your uniqueness. Be a better maker for yourself, for others, for the world.