The Outsized Impacts of Rudeness in the Workplace

New study finds rudeness can boost negative emotions, narrowing workers’ perceptions and incurring biases in judgment

Rude behavior is a common form of insensitive and disrespectful conduct that harms employee performance in the workplace. In a new study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers examined the impact of rude behavior on how individuals make critical decisions. The study found that in certain situations, these behaviors can have deadly consequences.

The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, University of Maryland, Envision Physician Services and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

The researchers looked at the effect of rudeness on workers’ tendency to engage in a judgment bias called anchoring, which is the tendency to rely too heavily or fixate on one piece of information when making a decision.

Small Insults, Serious Consequences

“While small insults and other forms of rude behavior might seem relatively harmless compared to more serious forms of aggression, our findings suggest that they can have serious consequences,” says Binyamin Cooper, a postdoctoral fellow at CMU’s Tepper School of Business and a member of the Collaboration and Conflict Research Lab, which led the study.

“Our work demonstrates how dangerous these seemingly minor behaviors can be, whether they are experienced directly or even if people just observe incidental rudeness. Let’s say that a doctor walks into a patient’s room for the first time, and a family member says ‘I think he’s having a heart attack,’” Cooper says. “Our findings suggest that if on the way to see the patient, the doctor witnessed a rude event between two other people, he or she would be significantly more likely to settle on a diagnosis of a heart attack, even if that is incorrect.”

Cooper and his colleagues tested the effects of rudeness on anchoring in four studies across different settings — from medical simulations to negotiations to general judgment tasks. In one study, anesthesiology residents participated in a simulation on life-sized anatomical human models. The simulation was set up to suggest that a patient could have an allergic reaction to one of his medications, which served as the anchor. Before the simulation started, half the residents witnessed a senior doctor enter the room and yell at a resident for missing a meeting, while the other half witnessed a neutral interaction.

When the patient’s condition began to deteriorate later in the simulation, the residents who were exposed to the rude interaction were more likely to diagnose allergic shock, when in reality the patient was bleeding internally, and the diagnosis affected how they administered care. The study also showed that the reason rudeness was so harmful was that it is related to increased high arousal of negative emotions such as irritability and distress, which predicted the tendency to engage in anchoring.

Mitigating the Effects

The practical implications of the study’s findings are many, the authors note. For example, physicians exposed to rudeness may incorrectly treat patients for ailments they do not have, while being unaware of their incorrect diagnosis or the reasons underlying it.

“Making the wrong decision at a critical moment means that people end up spending too much time going down the wrong path,” Cooper explains. “If there’s not enough time to realize the error and make up for it, this could be deadly.”

In demonstrating that encounters with rudeness cause anchoring, the authors call on managers and organizations to take steps to reduce rudeness and mitigate its effects among employees, particularly in high-stakes situations where consequences of judgment errors can be catastrophic.

Organizations can train employees to use perspective taking and information elaboration.

Perspective taking, where employees imagine themselves viewing the same problem from another’s point of view, distances employees from the strong feelings that they would otherwise experience and makes them less likely to narrow their perspectives based on their own personal experience.

Information elaboration allows employees to practice identifying the task at hand and provides a few moments to stop and think about what information they need to make a decision.

“These active steps may seem small, but our work shows that organizations can use them to mitigate the harmful consequences associated with rudeness, which can make a big difference,” Cooper says. “They can be used in fields other than medicine, including negotiations, legal sentencing, financial forecasting, social exchange relationships and pricing decisions.”

The authors acknowledge several limitations to their study. First, they focused on anchoring as one of the most common decision-making biases, but it remains to be seen if the effect of rudeness affects other decision-making biases. Second, except for perspective taking and information elaboration, their study did not examine empathy, experience or other dispositional and contextual factors that may influence the relationship between rudeness and negative emotions.

This article is summarized from “Trapped by a First Hypothesis: How Rudeness Leads to Anchoring,” a Journal of Applied Psychology article. Copyright 2021 American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.