Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (2 page)

I don’t think that’s good enough. So, in every chapter, I’ve laid out reasons, based in behavioral science, for
why
we should behave in certain ways. The science behind and throughout much of this book not only provides a foundation for the guidelines within but also gives you a framework so you can figure things out for yourself in the moment and answer any questions that aren’t addressed here.

And finally, in addition to all the advice in this book, I’ve included stories and photos to give you that wonderfully satisfying feeling I call “rudenfreude”—the joy of seeing those who abuse the rest of us called out for what tiny sociopathic little tyrants they are. To borrow from Gandhi, who was asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”

The science of stopping the rude

It was around the year 2000
when I started feeling that people were suddenly ruder than ever—and not just in Los Angeles, where I live, but back in the Midwestern decency belt, where I grew up, and all across the USA. By 2008, I noticed that everybody, everywhere, seemed to be grousing about how the world had become a much ruder place and speculating about why. Many pointed the finger at the permissive parenting of kids these days—conveniently forgetting that the last driver who vigorously flipped them the bird was some wizened old man. Pundits, especially, were quick to blame Scapegoat 2.0, technology: “It’s all those cell phones” or “It’s the Internet; it alienates people.” Oh, right—when it isn’t functioning as the single most connective force in human history. And sorry, all you cell phone blamers, but iPhones don’t leap out of people’s pockets and purses, put themselves on speaker, and float around the grocery store barking into the ears of everybody shopping.

To make meaningful headway in stopping rudeness, we need to understand why we’re rude. I’d been attending psychology and evolutionary psychology conferences and referencing sex-and mating-related journal articles in my syndicated love advice column. I expanded my focus to topics like reciprocal altruism (you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours-ism) and compared how ancestral humans lived with how we’re living today. Eventually, I came to a stunning conclusion:

We’re rude because we live in societies too big for our brains.

RUDENESS IS THE HUMAN CONDITION

Although we’re experiencing more rudeness these days, we haven’t really changed; our environment has. Evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, in their online primer on evolutionary psychology, explain, “Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind,” meaning that we’re living in the twenty-first century with brains largely adapted to solve prehistoric hunter-gatherers’ day-to-day mating and survival problems. Their challenges included finding mates, hunting animals, gathering plants to eat, negotiating fair treatment, defending against aggression, raising children, and choosing an optimal habitat. Sometimes the most sensible behavior for ancestral times can be a glaring mismatch in our modern world, but the adaptations guiding all of these tasks are built of what Cosmides and Tooby describe as “complex computational machinery.” Because of that complexity and because even relatively simple changes in our brain’s circuitry can take tens of thousands of years, it’s not like we can just say to our genes, “Hey, it’s the twenty-first century; get with the program!” Cosmides and Tooby give the example that “it is easier for us to learn to fear snakes” than electrical sockets, even though sockets pose a larger threat than snakes in most American communities.
¹

We do continue to evolve; the ability to digest lactose (the sugar in cow’s milk), an adaptation in some of us since the advent of dairy farming, perhaps 10,000 years ago, is just one example of that. But, most of the psychology guiding how we approach modern life comes from adaptations to far earlier environments. Take our desire for sweets. We evolved a malnutrition-combating lust for sugary food when we couldn’t be sure where our next handful of grubs was coming from—back when eating sweets meant nibbling a handful of vitamin-rich berries off a bush. This sugar-lust is still with us—but you can now drive to a warehouse megamart, have them bring twelve cubic feet of chocolate-covered doughnuts out to your car on a forklift, and then mow through them like you can’t be sure where your next handful of grubs is coming from.

Our brains are especially unprepared for suburban sprawl. The problem seems to be the size of our neocortex, the brain’s reasoning and communication department. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar noticed that in various animals, neocortex size corresponded to the maximum number of others of their species they could associate with without chaos and violence breaking out. Dunbar looked at the human neocortex size and predicted that humans would have the capacity to manage social interaction in societies with a maximum of 150 people (148.7, to be exact).

Looking to test his prediction, Dunbar poked around human history and found the 150-person group size everywhere—in archeological evidence of hunter-gatherer societies and in 21 hunter-gatherer societies still in existence. (The average group size was 148.4.) One hundred fifty was the population size of villages in traditional farming societies and the size of most military units from Roman times on, and it even showed up in a study of the number of people other people have on their Christmas card list (a mean of 154). Dunbar and other researchers who have done studies on social networking also find that people have, on average, about 150 Facebook friends.

Whatever the exact limit of human social relationships, Dunbar notes that sociologists have long recognized that there’s something unmanageable about groups of more than 150 to 200. Bill Gore, the founder of the company that makes the waterproof and breathable fabric GORE-TEX, finds that there’s a “precipitous drop in cooperation” when everyone in a group no longer “knows” everyone else, so he limits occupancy in his plants to 200 people. When a plant reaches that occupancy limit, he opens another. The Hutterites, a fundamentalist religious sect in the US and Canada, regard 150 as the maximum size of their communities. “They explicitly state that when the number of individuals is larger than 150, it becomes difficult to control their behaviour by means of peer pressure alone,” Dunbar writes in
Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
. “Rather than create a police force, they prefer to split the community.”

Of course, there would have been no need for a police force back in the Stone Age. In a small band of people who all know one another, piggish behavior like grabbing more than one’s fair share of a resource would have been extremely risky, possibly leading to being expelled and forced to go it alone in the wilderness—very likely a death sentence back in an ancestral landscape not exactly flush with 7-Elevens and couchsurfing opportunities. This would have been a powerful force for keeping would-be rudesters in line.

It all started to become clear to me: We’re experiencing more rudeness because we’ve lost the constraints on our behavior that we’ve had in place for millions of years. We didn’t evolve to be around strangers and aren’t psychologically equipped to live in a world filled with them, yet that’s exactly how we’re living—in vast strangeropolises, where it’s possible to go an entire day or days without running into anybody we know.

You can behave terribly to strangers and have a good chance of getting away with it because you’ll probably never see your victims again. If, on the other hand, that’s your neighbor driving behind you and you flip him off, you’re likely to find a Mount Whitney–sized pile of dog poop on your front walk the next morning.

Being around people you know doesn’t just deter rude behavior; it promotes neighborly behavior. In a small, finite community, reputation is a major concern. Even if you aren’t exactly fond of Mrs. Jones, you may need her to help you or vouch for you at some point, or vice versa, and strained relations will probably reflect badly on both of you, so you both act neighborly. The motivation may be selfish, but the end result is a community of people who treat one another better.

Living in a world of strangers is a very recent development. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was still common for people to be born and die in the same house, next to houses of others doing the same. The shift to a more transient society got kicked off in the 1950s, with the building of the interstate highways. After airline deregulation in the 70s, relocating thousands of miles away suddenly meant living only a few hours and a few hundred dollars away. The growth of cheap or free long distance and the Internet further shrank the miles, and it became common for people to live great distances from their friends and relatives. At the same time, people’s working lives began becoming increasingly unstable. Being employed by one company all the way through retirement—or even having a single career—is now a quaint situation mainly seen in black-and-white movies. These days, a family might stay a year in one house and then move thousands of miles to another, and another. It hardly seems worth it to get to know the neighbors.

GETTING THE RUDE OUT

We can’t turn back the clock to a world where we all live in small villages and everybody knows everybody and the blacksmith. What we can do is take steps to re-create some of the constraints and benefits of the small groupings we evolved to live in. This may sound like an enormous undertaking, but it’s actually not. In fact, we could dial back a lot of the ME FIRST!/SCREW YOU! meanness permeating our society if we do just three things:

• Stand up to the rude.

• Expose the rude.

• Treat strangers like neighbors.

Most people aren’t comfortable standing up to the rude. That’s totally understandable. Because humans didn’t evolve to be around strangers, when someone we don’t know is abusing the rest of us, the course of action suggested by our genes is something along the lines of “Page Not Found.” There are some people, however, who can’t help but say something on behalf of the group or another person they see being taken advantage of. I’m one of them. In economist-speak, I’m a “costly punisher,” someone who gets outraged at injustice they perceive and is compelled to go after wrongdoers, very possibly incurring some serious personal costs in the process.

Say, for example, I ask somebody at the movies to stop yammering on their phone. They’re unlikely to thank me warmly or cut me in on their lottery winnings. They may even stab me in the neck with a turkey baster, as did the boyfriend of a phone-yammering woman whom some movie theater patron in Orange County, California, asked to pipe down. (The patron survived; the turkey baster’s in an evidence locker; the slasher’s doing forty-plus years in the pen.)

Costly punishment has yet to be that costly for me—maybe because I’m a good judge of character or maybe because I’m just lucky and a fast runner. The truth is, I don’t speak up to just anyone. If somebody being rude looks armed or crazy, I curse them silently and wish them a bad case of genital itching. But, in general, my ire at the rude blithely taking advantage of the rest of us overwhelms my fear of being gutted with a kitchen implement, and has ever since I started looking at rudeness for what it really is: theft.

If somebody steals your wallet, it’s a physical thing that’s there and then gone, so you get that you’ve been robbed. The rude, on the other hand, are stealing valuable intangibles like your attention (in the case of cell phone shouters who privatize public space as their own). When somebody parks straddling the two spaces behind the dry cleaner—forcing you to drive around and hunt for a spot at a meter—they’re stealing your time and peace of mind. Rude neighbors who blast music at 2 a.m. are stealing your good night’s sleep and maybe even your life and others’, should you drowse off behind the wheel and take out a school bus. Letting the rude get away with robbing you emboldens them to keep robbing you—and the rest of us. We all need to start identifying the rude as the thieves they are, which is what it will take for more people to get mad enough to get up on their hind legs and refuse to be victimized.

Exposing rude behavior to a wide audience is particularly important. In the modern strangerhood, when someone’s abusing a person or group of people they don’t know and won’t see again, concerns about what it will do to their reputation are pretty much moot. We can change that through a form of positive shaming that I call “webslapping”—yanking away the anonymity of the rude by discreetly shooting a photo or cell phone video of them in action and uploading it to the Internet. (Yes, ironically, the road back to the civility of the 150-person village goes straight through the Global Village.)

Webslapping is typically the best solution when somebody’s egregiously rude—when whatever they’re doing reflects such a sense of entitlement that asking them to be more considerate will likely only result in their acting more rudely out of spite. Even if the particular rudester never learns of their ignominious star turn on the Internet, the fear of being similarly exposed should deter other rude people from acting assholishly to the rest of us. We may have lost the built-in peer pressure of a tiny world of people who all know one another, but there’s a new sheriff out there, and it’s the YouTube video gone viral.

Of course, most people probably aren’t going to shoot and post a video, but there is something we all can do, and that’s to make a daily effort to treat strangers like neighbors: smile at the guy passing us on the sidewalk, say hello to the cashier, do the small kindnesses that we would for somebody we know.

Once you start, you’ll see that this not only makes other people feel good but makes you feel good, too. As I explain in detail in the final chapter, “Trickle-Down Humanity,” it turns out that it’s actually in our self-interest to do kind acts for others. Research by positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky suggests that being generous to others is one of the main ways (along with expressing gratitude) that we can increase our happiness. Showing another person a little generosity of spirit is also likely to put them in the spirit to “pay it forward” to people they encounter … and so on, and so on. The way I see it, a bare minimum of one kind act a day should be our self-imposed cover charge for living in this world. We get the society we create—or the society we let happen to us.