rudeness reverberates: WHy snapping snips success
Most of us have been in a meeting where one colleague snapped at another - and while we weren’t in the firing line - we somehow felt the effects. A piece of research by Christine Porath and Amir Erez brilliantly explains why these awkward exchanges are more impactful on our performance than we might imagine.
In 2009 they published a paper titled "Overlooked but not untouched", in which they ran three experiments with university students to find out what happens to people who simply watch someone else being treated badly.
In the first study the experimenter was rude to a student who turned up late (who was, of course, in on it), and in the second study the rudeness came from one student towards another, so the researchers could see whether it mattered if the rude person had power or was just a peer.
Everyone then did a couple of tasks, including solving anagrams and that classic creativity exercise where you list as many uses for a brick as you can in five minutes.
The students who had witnessed the rudeness solved fewer anagrams and came up with fewer uses for the brick, dropping from 9.74 ideas to 7.88 in the first study and from 10.33 to 7.75 in the second, and when independent raters scored the ideas, the ones from people who had seen rudeness were judged less creative as well.
They also became noticeably less helpful, because in the first study only 26.5% of the people who had watched the rudeness volunteered to help the researcher with an extra task, compared with 50% of the people who had seen nothing unpleasant happen at all.
The researchers found that the explanation was mood, since watching someone get snapped at left people feeling worse, and that bad feeling was enough to squeeze the room they had available for thinking well and thinking generously.
In the third study they tested whether it made a difference if the person on the receiving end was framed as a competitor, and while that did soften the effect a little, it did not make it go away, which tells you something slightly humbling about how little choice we have in the matter.
What I love about this study is that it puts a number on something most of us already feel in our bones, which is that one person's bad behaviour in a meeting is never a private exchange between two people, because everyone else in the room is paying for it not just with their discomfort - but also their cognitive performance.
Reference: Porath, C. L., & Erez, A. (2009). Overlooked but not untouched: How rudeness reduces onlookers' performance on routine and creative tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(1), 29–44.