The Power of Polite

seem not so much of a big deal. The elevator. I'm so glad to not use an elevator anymore every day to get to the office in our new building, right, I just take the stairs. It saves me that that that feeling you get when you rush ahead onto the elevator and then you realize there's someone else coming. But if you don't look at them, then you're not obligated to keep the door open. Yeah, there's a whole we've

talked about this, we actually did. Yeah, elevator elevator etiquette, and how a lot of that, like your politeness, is probably tied to the algorithm of that elevator because if you know that that elevator is only gonna come every two seconds, you're not probably gonna hold the open door button for that person. Yeah. The algorithm for the stairs is pretty simple, and that's if I slip and fall, probably nobody will find me in there because no one

uses those stairs. And that's that's you know. That's the interesting thing about politeness too, is that, um, yeah, I hope that you don't have something fall by the way, that would be terrible. Um. That's the interesting thing about politeness is that it seems like at face value it's

pretty straightforward. But as we will get into there is a kind of algorithm in place that dictates our levels of politeness, and when we engage in it, Yeah, we're constantly tuning our politeness level to meet every face, every situation. It's ultimately, I keep thinking of this this massive spider web, and it's holding us all in our place, our place in society, our place in our interpersonal relationships, and just and and and we depend on that wedding just to

hold it all together. It sounds kind of dastardly, the web of polite, Yes, because there's a big spider there somewhere, right indeed ready to gobble us up. Um. But you know, one of the things that we came across in our research is that politeness, as well intentioned as it can be, can sometimes be misconstrued. And a good example of this

is holding doors open for men. Oh yes, yeah. And there's a research paper entitled When Door Holding Harms Gender and the Consequences of non Normative Help by Megan McCarty and Janice Kelly. And I think that title kind of says it all. Non normative help. Um. So what we're talking about here hundred and nineties unsuspecting men and women stepping through two portals into a Purdue University building. But first they were a by a male member of the

research team as they walked toward the building. For half, the research associate quote took a step in front of the participant, opened the door and let the participant walk through the front door first. Very chivalrous. Right. For the other half, he reached for the adjacent door, so that the two opened their doors more or less simultaneously. Would you think that there would be weirdness from this? Yeah?

I think I would think there would be. Yeah, I mean, initially I wouldn't have thought so, but once those people got on the other side of the door, there was a female research associate and she approached each subject and asked him or her to complete a short survey and on a one attend scale, they indicated UH their agreement with three statements measuring self esteem, including quote I feel that I'm a person of worth um at least on an equal plane with others, and three measuring self efficacy,

including I can usually achieve what I want if I work hard for it. And the results is that male and only males, reported lower levels of self esteem and self confidence if the door had been held open for them. Oh, so it comes down to like the basic power to enter a space and and your your self worth in entering it. If someone is opening the door for you, then your masculine reptilian brain can't handle it, or your gender performing self can't handle it um And that's the

gender performing part. Is interesting because there's a guy named Irving Goffman, a Canadian American sociologist, and he viewed society through what is called symbolic interaction perspective. So this is kind of like everyday behavior in the interactions between people to help explain why society is the way that it is. And Goffman applied something called dramaturgical analysis and already too in order to study this kind of social interaction. Um

so he looked at this as really theater performance. In his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he looked at self as an image deriving from the perceptions and responses of others that create the face of the person, and two as the actor, as a player in a

game or a set of rituals. So, for self preservation's sake, the self, especially the actor representing yourself right, would be interested in cooperations, signs and symbols and well understood practices in society, like hey, you don't hope open the door for me. I'm a strong man. I don't need another

man to do that. Right. So, in other words, for most of us, we inhabit these actor selves on stage responding to an audience, whoever the audience is, and we try to guide the impression and form the identity through the gaze of others, and our backstage selves are hidden away. And this is where a lot of this idea of

politeness and how we perform it comes into play. I like the use of signs, symbols and ritual in this because it makes it sound like every interaction we have, every little polite interaction is is ultimately just a ritualistic activity UM dealing with an abstract self, which show which kind of mean because everything has some sort of context to it that we all understand the game rules to write, Like, if you were just given this object and you had

never seen it before, you wouldn't know what to do with it or how to interact with it. You would need someone to tell you, like, this is uh, this sphere and you can open up one of the compartments. I'm holding the actual like sphere like thing um and it's empty and you can put paper clips in it. Otherwise you'd be if you've never seen it before, you

would be like, what is this alien thing? Yeah, I mean every every little interaction, particularly the holding the door scenario that we've been discussing here, it's it's kind of its own little micro reality. It's it's own little game with a set of rules and expectations. And no matter what else is going on in the office building, or the environment, or the country or the personal lives that are going on, you have to enter that micro reality at least for a few seconds to deal with it.

Full disclosure here, um, Over the past couple of years, myself and a couple of the other house staff works female staff workers here have been holding doors open for men and then just seeing if they have a certain kind of body language afterward. And just for the record, the only person who has not allowed us to open the door for him and not knowing what was going on at all, with Scott Benjamin of Carson. It was

the nicest, most polite person in the world. He knows the rules of the game and he's not gonna allow you to break them. Noop alright, so Goffman theory that was nine early sixties that comes out. The next step in this study of politeness comes from with politeness theory from husband and wife researchers Steven c. Levinson and Penelope Brown. The basic concept here is that people have a social

self image and they consciously projected. Okay. The self image is called face, as in you know, to save face, and it has a dual nature positive face and negative face. Positive face seeks approval, while negative face wants to be left alone, doesn't want to be imposed upon. Now what face do you have? What face are you dealing with?

I mean it all, it all depends, especially when you're dealing with a face threatening act or an f t A where the face that you're you're wearing is essentially challenged. And of course there are two shades of this as well. Positive f t A s are a direct challenge to face or self image. You can think of this in terms of an insult, a socially inappropriate comment, something of that nature. Meanwhile, negative FDAs are far more confrontational. Uh, somebody has to budge, somebody has to act, and an

imposition is being made. The example that that keeps coming to my mind on this one on the negative FDA is Dr Seus's story The Zacks from It was. It's a very short little story in the book The Sneeches. And you have a north going Zack and a south going Zack and they neeed together, and I believe the desert of packs, and neither one is gonna budge, like the one is saying you have to get out of my way because I'm going north and that's the way

I roll. And then the south going Zack says, no, I'm I'm going south and you're in my way, and you've got to get out of the way, because that's how I roll. And they neither one budges, and civilization builds up around them and roads are built over them in the highway and packs. But but yeah, so that's that's not engaging in the act of cooperation, right, And that's ultimately what it what what is happening in in in a negative f t A is somebody has to budge.

And I was thinking about the term f t A this this facial threatening act that sounds so dramatic, But have you ever been in a situation where you've been with another person or a group of people and everything is pretty light and then one person's face falls and has and drops out of that sort of cooperative thing. And it's really a very unsettling thing to see that because it's so clear that that person is upset or

feels threatened or is threatening another person. Yeah, Like the classic example would be you accidentally make some sort of faux paw you make, you make an off color joke, and unknowingly it affects somebody on a personal level. Yeah, So politeness theory essentially is driving home the idea that

politeness serves to both reflect and regulate our social distance. Now, politeness theory identifies for politeness strategies that a speaker uses, and the first is what is called a bald On strategy, and it's a direct approach that you would use with someone that you know really well, so like a family member or a loved one. So for example, you're at home visiting your parents, you might say, I want pizza

for dinner. Right, very direct the second strategy because by the way, you don't have to worry about their faces falling so much, right they from the child on the pizza, sure is right? Right um, But again you don't have to worry worry about the ft A factor too much. The second strategy, the positive politeness strategy, shows you recognize that your audience or the person you're talking to, has a desire to be respected. It also confirms that the

relationship is friendly and expresses group reciprocity. So perhaps the request would be something like, is it okay we have pizza for dinner tonight? You know, it's just a little bit softer of a lab there the negative politeness strategy. The third strategy also recognizes audiences faces, but it also recognizes that you are in some way imposing upon them. Okay,

So again we're seeing degrees of relationships removed here. So maybe this is someone I wouldn't normally have dinner with, and I don't know what the preferences are, so you could say something like, um, you know, I don't wanna impose upon you or anything, but I was thinking that pizza would be great. Okay. So semantically you're throwing in

some more stuff there to create that distance. And then the final strategy is called the off record indirect strategy, and this super I love this because it takes a lot of the pressure off of you. Um, because you're really trying to avoid this direct, face threatening act of asking for pizza or whatever it is. Right, Um, So what you do is you say something along the lines of, um, hey,

it's it's it's national pizzaday. I heard that restaurants are giving ten percent of their profits to you and a stuff, And you're trying to make that person anticipate what you're saying and make the decision for you. Yeah, almost make them decide to do the thing you want them to do. Almost Jedi mind trick them, right, Yeah, Yeah, all all in an attempt to avoid the dreaded f t A

right and in an attempt to secure cooperation. Now, I made the analogy of a web earlier, about everyone being suspended in this web, and I keep coming back to that in part because distance is such a key aspect of all of this. And when I talk about distance, I'm talking about not only spatial distance as as definitely space plays into any polite interaction how far am I away from that individual, but also psychological distance, semantic distance UM,

temporal distance. Uh. It was we'll get into especially when you think of in terms of sending a letter or an email to somebody, when is it going to be received? When in time are you addressing someone? So. Politeness theory suggests that three aspects of interpersonal situations are universally related to politeness. Number one the relative power of the address

see over the speaker. Number two the degree of imposition of the to be performed act, and number three the social distance between the speaker and the address see as such, According to the theory, speakers use more polite language when addressing individuals with a higher higher status UM than individuals with equal or lower status uh. They use more polite language when asking for a bigger favor versus a smaller one, and when addressing strangers versus familiar people, none of that

should come as a surprise. Right. You're you're you're dealing with a police officer that just pulled you over. You're gonna, generally, you're gonna roll out all the polite, polite niceties, right, far more than you would um with just you know,

a teller at a local store. Right. So. A two thousand ten paper from a Tel Aviv University Department of psychology investigated how politeness affects and is affected by the level of constroal temporal distance, of constroal distance, temporal distance, and spatial distance, and they predicted that greater politeness would be associated with higher levels of greater temporal and spatial distance.

So in in examining this, they conducted no fewer than eight separate studies, and most of these were written evaluations, test quizzes. Uh. Pretty un um exciting stuff. But uh, but at the end of it, they had some some pretty key findings that shed some light on just how politeness works within a cultural construct. Uh. They said people were more polite when they addressed a person they construed in terms of abstract goals and dispositions rather than concrete

means and situations. So this would be an example. This would be, um, uh, you know, a general meeting with the boss, as opposed to a we've got to hit this deadline? Where are you standing on this project meeting with the boss? Okay. They were more polite when they expect did the target to receive the message in the relatively distant future, when they referred to relatively distant future actions,

and when they addressed individuals in relatively distant locations. And they found that a request to generate polite statements prompted participants to use abstract verbs. So the example here would be can you help me with some lecture materials is coded as more abstract than can you show me some lecture materials? Okay, so show is more of a demand. Yeah, it's you know, the difference between hey can you help me with this? And hey, can you do half of

this for me? You know, right? Um. They found that the polite utterances were judged as pertaining to the relatively distant future and were judged as directed to addresses and relatively remote locations, which, um, which is internet. You know, we can all think of examples where we've may have addressed someone and said, hey, if you have time to get to this, and no rush on this, but if you have a minute, can You may be unloaded dishwasher, and you're all heady, sort of pushing that event, that

unloading of the dishwasher into a more distant future. You're you're establishing more temporal distance between you and the person you're addressing, even if the dishwasher really needs to be unloaded in the immediate future. Yeah, and you are employing that negative politeness strategy to right the opposing part. The Tel Aviv study um also said that when instructed to use polite language and addressing another person, participants preferred a

relatively large spatial distance from that person. So they're they're actually preferred to stand a little a little farther away from the individual, or perhaps uh, you know, be isolated from them across a larger desk. So, but politeness and distance seem to go hand in hand. It's uh, it's almost the equivalent I keep thinking of. You know, we can't help it make Caveman analogies with any of these

sort of basic underpinnings of human behavior studies. But I think of like of of somebody encountering like an enraged ape and you don't want to make eye contact with them. You don't want to establish that closeness with them because there's danger, so you would do more to distance yourself from the danger and employ more politeness. And that's where the f t A comes from. Right, That's where the

drama of that comes from. So that's on the request side of things, right, that kind of shows how tentative or sometimes how we kind of loathe to even ask for help, right, how we do it. So if you are on the flip side and someone's asked you something, um, how effective are sweet little nothings like thank you? Right? Um?

Adam Grant and Francesca Gino ran four experiments looking at how the thank you sentiment played out with helpers and the research, by the way, It is published in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In the first study, they had sixty nine participants who were asked to provide feedback to a fictitious student named Eric. Now,

the participants didn't know this was a fictitious student. They just got some feedback or they just got an email from him and so he asked for a little bit of feedback on his cover letter for a job opplcation. Now, after sending their feedback through by email, that got a reply from Eric asking for more help with another cover letter. Half of them received this follow up with a thank you incorporated into it, and half of them received a follow up from Eric that was neutral with no thank

you in it. So the results were that helped Eric in comparison to sixty six when those people received a thank you, so already you can see that thirty two to sixty six that that was. That's a pretty big impetus for trying to help someone again if you receive

that little small token of gratitude. And this has a kind of pay it forward aspect to it, because the next day, the same participants received an other um request, this time from a fictitious person named Stephen, who asked if they could help them, And the percentage who offered to help Stephen was twenty five when they had received no gratitude from Eric, but this shot up to when they had been thanked by Eric. So the politeness of

Eric's billed over into their willingness to help Stephen exactly. Yeah, so it affected that in as that sort of pay it forward aspect to it. Now. The third and fourth studies yielded similar results, but they used face to face scenarios and all had the same idea that the simple act of gratitude was helping to ratchet up the feelings of self worth in the respondents. In the participants, So it's not just a you know, nicety of saying hey, thank you so much. It's actually kind of feeding into

the ego a bit. Yeah, it's interesting to how then each interaction is kind of helping to maintain the social order of the politeness h algorithm. Yeah, because it's basically saying, I'm imposing upon you my apologies. Can you help me? Because we live in this cooperative society and that's how we've survived as a species. How about it? And the other person says, sure, here you go on. The other person, thank you for doing that. I know you didn't need to.

All right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to discuss what's the most polite country in the world, what's the least polite country in the world, and can you be too polite? All right, we're back. What is the most polite country in the world. Now, I'm sure everyone has their own sort of individual take on this based on their own individual interactions with other

cultures in other countries. But generally speaking, when people talk about polite cultures and phenomenal politeness, they talk about Japanese politeness. They are famous for it, yes, and and indeed, when we say phenomenal it is studied as a phenomenon um by researchers UH. Linguistic politeness in Japanese culture UH has especially been an item of study by Stanford's uh Yoshiko Matsumoto,

Professor of Japanese Language and Linguistics. In her work in the late eighties and early nineties, Matsumoto argued that the themes of Anglo Saxon individualism in politeness theory doesn't even really work with Japanese culture. That the end that the very concept of face, particularly that of negative face, is

is ultimately just kind of alien to the Japanese. She said, quote what is of paramount concern to a Japanese is not his or her own territory, but the position in relation to others in the group and his her acceptance of others. Loss of face is associated with the perception of others that one has not comprehended and acknowledged the structure and hierarchy of the group. Mm hmm. So an example of this that we see in in just the

linguistics of the whole scenario. In English, when we meet somebody, what do we say, nice to meet you, Nice to meet you, which, of course, is such such an empty statement. It's nice, like nice? What is even like it's a pleasure to meet you? Is it a pleasure like chocolate is a pleasure? Yeah, yeah, it's it's such an empty statement. But you're you have to say it. You have to say something or some version of it, because it's just start part of the contract, part of the back and

forth is the rules of the game. Okay. Uh. But it's certainly a phrase with a lot of distance in it, right, it's just merely nice to meet you, to make your acquaintance. Uh, lots of spatial distance, lots of symbolic distance, lots of Hey, let's start this on a positive foot. Yes we are. This is very clinical. Really. However, in Japan, a typical form of greeting is the following, and I apologize to our our our Japanese speaking listeners. I'm I'm sure I'm

not going to hit this correctly. Dozu your oshako agamash which means I ask you to please treat me well, take care of me, which to to foreign ears, uh, it might sound a little personal. It sounds very vulnerable and very honest. Right, yeah, it's like, hey, take care of me, suckle me. You know, I don't think the suckle me is okay, but it does have an aspect to it that's like, hey, I'm meeting you, I'm I'm vulnerable, and um, treat me well. I mean, that's that's much more.

That resonates a lot more than nice to meet you. Now, if you were going to go strictly by politeness theory, however, this would be a bit of a negative face and position. Right. It lacks the distance of that in that English language politeness, But in this we see that the But in this it really zeroes in on the focus on inter dependence in Japanese culture um and that interdependence even has a special name in Japanese culture um Amaru and it uh.

It's all about placing yourself in another's care as a sign of respect. Um also respecting your elders and realizing that you're you're ultimately under their protection, under their guidance, and therefore it's a it's a sign of respect, and you're you're recognizing the existing social hierarchy by saying, please take care of me. Okay. So instead of denying the threat as hey, nice to meet you. Everything's good here, right,

there's no threat, it's more an acknowledgement of a possible threat. Yeah, right, hey, take care of me. I know you that you could not do me a solid here, right, but please do. Yeah. And if you fail to recognize this hierarchy, um and and the ranking here and the interconnectedness, then you're creating an impression of ignorance or lack of self control, and then you lose face for real. Huh. Okay. Now, in terms of the least polite country, this one is a

lot harder to get to a lot of people. When it's represented in the media, at least frame it as sort of a tourist goes to this country and they find these people to be rude. Well, that's erroneous in terms of logic anyway, because it's you know, that sort of experience is freighted with cultural expectations and violations of norms. Right, So my norm in the United States is gonna be different this one else's norm in France, for instance. So the best way to get at this is again to

go more towards that direct indirect nature of language. And this is really plumped by Eva Ogerman's excellent article Politeness and Indirectness Across Cultures A comparison of English, German, Polish and Russian requests. Again interact direct and requests that we're dealing with here, and she writes that English and German, for example, tend to contain the more distancing and polite indirect request, whereas Russian and Polish is more direct. She

writes quote. What Brown and Levinson's theory does not account for is that some cultures appreciate pragmatic clarity while associating directness with honesty. Indirect requests, on the other hand, not only increase quote the interpretive demands on the hearer. Uh. In other words, you have to really listen carefully if I'm saying, hey, it's National Pizza Day, to try to figure out what it is that I'm hinting at, she says, but can also quote make the speaker sound devious and

the nepulative. Indeed, coming back to the Jetti mind trick thing, why are you trying to trick me into thinking pizza is a great idea when really you just want me to you just want pizza. Right, So she's saying in this example, um, you know, the Russian here isn't necessarily discounting that direct approach because that feels more honest. And she also says, a Russian here or does not necessarily regard a request as an imposition on her or his

personal freedom and a potential refuse. It involves less face loss for a Russian speaker than it does for somebody with an Anglo Saxon cultural background. In other words, if you make a request and the person says no, then it's not as heart wrenching as it would be in

in an Anglo Saxon exchange. It's interesting too, uh. You know, when you think of Russian culture, one of the sort of stereotypes that comes to mind is very close personal interaction during greetings, right, kisses on the face even uh, you know one one man kissing another on the face, or or you know Vladimir Putin kissing a small boy, and it's it's all perfectly acceptable. Well, you're right, So you see that correlation with there's a directness with language,

and there's a directness with personal space. So the nonverable a viable matchup. Yeah. Meanwhile, in the in Japanese cultures, you definitely see more of a uh a spatial distance

in interactions as a whole. And yet both of them you would think of them as being completely different, but both of them are treading on the concept of honesty and and ultimately, like no, no no matter what particular culture you're looking at, and their various levels of politeness, their various semantic systems of politeness, I mean, it's all coming down to maintaining that webbing, maintaining that system of interactions that keeps everyone sane and uh and uh and and

and functional. Right. So, in this respect, there's a worth to being agreeable, right to putting yourself out there, to being polite. But the question then comes up, could you be too agreeable? Could you be too almost obedient? Ah? Yes? Uh? And in this week get into Stanley Milgram's obedient study, which I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with already, at least you know surface level and of course, this

is where we end up discussing the Holocaust while examining politeness. This, uh this study from Milgrom came up in the nineteen sixties, particularly the experiments began in July ninety one, just three months after the start of the trial of nerds of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Aikmann in Jerusalem. So the idea here, of course is we're millions of indige of individuals just following orders when it came to the Holocaust,

or were they actual accomplices? Could could you essentially just be so polite and fall in line and in doing so, you know, lead straight to the gates of hell. Uh So, that's what he decided to examine in a series of experiments. And it's it's worth noting that there were nineteen of these in all. This wasn't just one single experiment, but they were all kind of shades of the same the same um. But they are all sort of shades of

the same format. Okay. Uh So, basically, particularly with the most well known example of the experiment, which I think was Experiment five. Yet forty men recruited using newspay of her ads, paid four dollars and fifty each. They were brought in uh and divided into groups. So you had teachers who were asked to pull a lever and administer a shock every time a learner answered a question incorrectly. Learners were heard but not seen, and uh they were

part of the experiment. There wasn't really somebody being shocked in the next room. They were just pretending to be shocked, you know. All the while the learners are complaining about the shocks, which increased by fifteen volts for each wrong answer. At the three volte level, the learners bang on the wall for release, and beyond this there's only silence. And at this point the experiment or the authority figure in the scenario instructs the participant to treat this silence as

an incorrect response and deliver a further shock to the learner. Okay, so it's a pretty kind of diabolical scenario. Going into this, it was predicted that no more than three out of a hundred participants would actually deliver that maximum shock to a silent learner. Only three. That was that was one of the predictions going in. In reality, six of the participants in Milgram's best known study again experiment five delivered

the maximum shock thirty five percent. Then we're refusing to administer that highest shock level to this individual who is presumably unconscious or even dead following these previous shocks. Now, the obedience rates were different depending on the experiment. Again there were there were nineteen of them, and they be

varied with the scenario a bit. In each one, obedience rates dropped to forty seven point five percent in a Rundown apartment building environment versus a gale campus environment for for experiment number five. And then there was yet another experiment in which the learners only had to take notes about the shock, they didn't have to actually administer it, and in that obedience rates hit ninety two point five percent. So they were just bureaucratically a part of the shock,

and therefore they were more obedient. So the more distance, the more they could sort of objectify that person, yeah, exactly, and then carry that out. So how this plays into politeness theory and politeness across cultures. Milgram was essentially an evolutionary psychologist, and the central idea here is that there is a survival advantage to submitting to authority. He recognized the humans evolved a psychological mechanism for obedience, which he

called the agentic state. And in this state, normal moral inhibitions are bypassed and we become a mere agent of an authority. So the idea here is that there is there's an evolutionary advantage to politeness, there's an evolutionary advantage to staying in line with the social norms and obeying the authority figures that are sending you orders, suggestions, what

have you okay now? To explore this, u there was an extension of the Milgram study by researchers at the University of Graham Noble Alps in France, published in the two thousand and fourteen edition of the Journal of Personality. And they wanted to see which personality types were more or less likely to obey orders that resulted in pain

to others. And so participants were thirty five males, thirty one females fifty four from the general population and they were contacted by phone eight months after their participation in

a study transposing Milgrom's obedience paradigm. And these interviews were presented as opinion polls with no stated ties to the earlier experiment, and the personality was assessed by the Big Five Mini Markers questionnaire, which was also used in the Millgram studies, and this includes categories of personality like conscientiousness

and agreeableness. Now, political orientation and social activism were also measured, and the results confirmed hypotheses that the conscientiousness and agreeableness would be associated with willingness to administer high intensity electric

shocks to a victim. Um. The subjects what we're seeing here again had a more agreeable and conscientious personality the sort of disposition, and they were more likely to follow the orders given to them, um, even if it meant delivering these painful shocks so that they didn't go against authorities. So just sort of underscores all of what you were talking about with the Milgram studies. Uh, now this is interesting.

People with more left wing political leanings were less likely to deliver the painful shocks, and a particular group of study participants were described as holding study and refusing to harm others. And this group was women who had previously participated in rebellious political activism. And I think all of this kind of all the circles back to why why do atrocities happen? Does it? It's politeness? Really, factor that

much into obedience. Can it be so extreme that, um, that it ties back to this revival instinct of authorities and obedience. Yeah, I mean, of course it's gonna it's gonna vary depending on the particular cultural situation as well as the political climate. Right, But it's all really fascinating when you when you look at politeness in this way. It's not just the pleas and thank you is that we try to instill in children, you know, for good

reason because they will get more help. Um. But there there's a lot more going under the cover here of the semantics of it. Yeah. Indeed, I mean we are talking about something that kind of to to an extent, holds us all together, or at least allows us to

work within a given culture. And I think that's why you see too in computer mediated communication, talking about email and talking about Facebook, Twitter, so on and so forth, you see less of a regard for the feelings of others because you don't have that sort of you know, face to face interaction. You don't have to see that the look of spoilage across someone's face when you've said

something terrible. Indeed, Yeah, I mean, the uh, the modern world of email and online reviews and uh facebook comments. That really does skew everything a bit, especially when you start thinking again about those factors of of distance in space, distance and time, um, and how that factors into you thinking about the other person on the other end of a given email review. Yeah, and again it's it's occupying the headspace of the other person and kind of ties

back to empathy as well. And I was thinking, um, even when when you're thinking about the cadence of UM two people talking, there are specific rules in place there, rules that even whales observe. Yes, this is pretty interesting course of Whales are known uh for some of their their whale songs right there communicating uh with each other

across vast distances. Uh. And what happens when those calls overlap, right, those conversations overlap, while, as it turns out, the whales are actually uh doing what they can to remain polite

and courteous of those other conversations. Yeah. Natalia Ciaro Viskia of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and her colleagues discovered that whales change the intervals between their echolocating clicks in a way that seems to prevent cluttering the echoes from these other calls, and she says, quote in other words,

whales are polite listeners. They do not interrupt each other, which would be really important because there's there's uh information that's trying to be uh disseminated here, and if you don't get the information, well, hey, that might affect your survival. Yeah. I mean it's the sort of the the Jinga tower of communication, and certainly the human Jinga Tower of of

the intercommunication is far more complicated. Uh, but but the simplified whale model uh illustrates that that anytime there is uh there there's there's there's a social system in place, you have to have at least some level of politeness to make it work right or else you're going to be shunned. Yeah, and that's the really the crux of all of this, whether it's from an authority figure or

from the group. Um, which of course led us to wonder if there are any whale jerks out there that have been ejected from the group because I keep talking

over the other members. Yeah, because yeah, we were talking earlier about this, like, to what extent is whale society such that a rude whale just simply dies out and and therefore nature selects for polite whales, whereas in human culture, you you know, unmistakably you have individuals who uh don't really work well in polite society, but perhaps they have a skill that still makes them very valuable, you know, like that, you know, the guy at the prime primordial

camp fire, and then maybe not primorial, like like some guy at a prehistoric campfire. Maybe he's not great about joining in with the post meal conversation, but he's the best at grounding down uh, you know, weasel bones into necessary paste. So you've got to keep around. And that's why we developed willful inattention, as we discussed in that episode about willfully ignoring someone. Indeed. All right, so there

you have a politeness. You know, hopefully you have a more nuanced understanding and appreciation for all those little niceties to fill our life and to fill our interactions. Now, in the meantime, do you want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind? Head on over

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