Why Are People Rude?
by J. E. Brown
Why are people rude? Many of you ask that. Here's why:
- Some people are rude because their parents didn't teach them the rules, and furthermore, their parents didn't know all the rules, having never learned them from their parents. So it's not the parents' fault. I'm not saying it's a good excuse to remain ignorant, I'm just saying it's a cause.
- Schools don't teach manners. Strangely, the only job skill not taught in schools is the crucial skill of getting along with coworkers. One day, the schools will teach relationships, just as they now teach math, science, and history -- subjects whose knowledge is less likely to be used. Until then, though, ignorance of what hurts others will remain widespread.
- Parents tend to teach manners retroactively rather than proactively. In other words, they don't teach manners preventively. They don't give their kids a handbook of rules of good behavior; instead, they wait for their kids to break a rule, and then correct them. Unfortunately, this leads parents to use the same tone of voice when they lay down the law and when they bark the more arbitrary orders like "Clean your room!" In such families, rule-teaching is hard to tell apart from impulsiveness and volatility. This in turn leads to rebellious teenage behavior, once the child comes to assume that all rules of manners are fascist control tactics, not necessary guidelines to protect household property and relationships. This leaves the children permanently soured on the idea of studying manners. Parents cause this form of rudeness if they care more about rigid obedience than household harmony. {You're reading "Why Are People Rude?" by J. E. Brown.}
Retroactive education also means that rules which are never broken during childhood never get taught, and so, are not passed from generation to generation. - Some parents see "immaturity" as a phase, rather than a result of their own failure to provide relationship education. So, they leave their children to learn manners on the street.
- Some people learned their manners from sitcoms. They believe in the myth of the "funny rude" person. These people are those self-appointed clowns who try to get a laugh at any price, and of course the easiest way to get laughs is to insult others. They haven't yet discovered that the price of rude humor ranges from hurt feelings to divorce proceedings. On television, the victims of insults never get offended, never harbor hurt feelings -- how conveniently lucky for the insulters. But in real life, psychology doesn't work that way.
- Some people are naturally evil: rapists, tyrannical bosses, gangs, bullies, and so on. When bullies are asked why they bully other kids, they answer that seeing the victim cry gives them a rewarding rush. Bullies of all kinds do what they do because they feel they can get away with it -- before a bully will strike, he or she must see the victim as unable or unwilling to stand up for himself/herself or as uneducated in the techniques of self-defense. {Read this comp1ete article at http://users.aol.com/Relationshop/WhyArePeopleRude.html .}
- Some rudeness and abuse persists because of naive bleeding hearts who deny the existence of evil, who insist that all people are basically good. But by choosing to overlook wrongdoing, or by treating it as non-serious, this attitude of denial only promotes evil, by giving it room to grow.
- Some people don't want to be good to others -- they just want others to be good to them. Consequently, these people don't read about relationships to make sure they're treating others right.
- Rude and abusive people have apologists to defend them. Anna Freud called this phenomenon "identification with the aggressor." Some call it "The Stockholm Syndrome." It means making excuses for the wrongdoer, and is a behavior often seen in the friends of bullies, who go along with their powerful friends' mischief in order to avoid being the victims of it themselves. It's also seen in those people who shift blame away from the aggressor and onto the victims, by telling the victims, "Maybe you provoked the rape by dressing sexy" and "It's not your place to judge others" and "You should turn the other cheek" as well as (paradoxically) "Well, you should have stood up for yourself!"
Challenging a bully can be dangerous; apologists find it easier to wimp out. Rare is the friend who knows the value of being loyal and taking your side; many "friends" find it easier to selectively point out the logic in the abuser's position. The abuser's right to free speech, for example.
One reason why there are apologists: People tend to sympathize with those whose guilt they share. So, by defending the rudeness of others, they betray their own vested interest in not being blamed for having behaved similarly.
If you doubt that anyone could be morally weak enough to defend the rude, watch what happens the next time you stand up to a bully. Bullies of course won't respond to anything less than nastiness and power; but the general population doesn't understand this. So, when you tell the story of how you stood up to a rude person and won, watch and see if your audience doesn't call you rude. See if they don't also ignore the bigger rudeness you were responding to. By chiding you, they encourage you to keep quiet and be a victim. Such remarks only serve the aggressor's interests.
Look for friends who care enough to back you up. No one who cares about you will ask you to be a sheep.
2 comments:
Here are excerpts from an article in APA website titled as "How Psychology Can Help Explain The Iraqi Prisoner Abuse". I trace this through Burmese author Ju's article in October 2007 publication of "Kalya" magazine. you can read full at http://www.apa.org/topics/iraqiabuse.html
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Americans were shocked by the photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, and now many want to know why “seemingly normal” people could behave so sadistically. Psychologists who study torture say most of us could behave this way under similar circumstances.
Q: What can the Stanford prison and Milgram experiments tell us about what has been happening in Iraq? How do these experiments help to explain what we have seen in the photos out of the Abu Ghraib prison?
A: Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo, who led the Stanford prison study in which two dozen college students were randomly selected to play the roles of prisoners or guards in a simulated jail, believes that his experiment has striking similarities to the Abu Gharib prison situation. "I have exact, parallel pictures of naked prisoners with bags over their heads who are being sexually humiliated by the prison guards from the 1971 study,” he said. xxxx xxxx Of the Stanford and Iraq prisons, he states, "It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches."
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To the degree that the Abu Ghraib guards were following orders from intelligence officers as some reports say, another experiment performed 40 years ago by Dr. Stanley Milgram, who taught psychology at Yale, also explains how people can end up abusing others in situations where one person has complete control over another.
Back in the early 1960s, while Milgram was teaching at Yale, he began studying the impact of authority on human behavior. He wanted to see whether ordinary people would follow an authority figure’s orders to keep administering what they thought were increasingly painful and possibly lethal electric shocks to other people. In over a dozen studies, with both Yale college students and more than 1,000 ordinary citizens, Milgram’s experiment assigned the subjects to be “teachers” who were to help “learners” improve their memories by punishing their mistakes with increasing levels of shock as they continued the learning task. The research director, who wore a white lab coat, made it clear that he was responsible for any harm to the “learners”.
These experimental findings shocked Dr. Milgram and also shocked the public once the findings were released in the news. The findings illustrated how someone in charge, in this case a researcher in a white lab coat giving instructions, could cause two-thirds of the subjects to keep raising the voltage levels to the full level of 450 volts despite the screams (and soon silence) of a learner in the next room. Social scientists have learned that in research, when subjects first observe a peer following the instructions completely, they do the same when it becomes their turn. This was the case here, where almost 100 percent of those subjects were blindly obedient to the authority figures. The learner subjects were actually confederates who were not really shocked, but led the subjects to believe they were. Milgram later identified some key conditions for suspending human morality, many relevant to Abu Ghraib:
There is given an acceptable justification for the behavior, akin to an ideology.
The guards (or teachers or participants) develop a distorted sense of the victims (or participants) as not comparable to themselves. Dehumanizing them as animals would be an extreme example.
Euphemisms, such as 'learners' (instead of victims) are used.
There is a gradual escalation of violence that starts with a small step.
Q: What percentage of people can be expected to become abusive and sadistic when power is placed in their hands?
A: According to Dr. Zimbardo and others who studied the issue, the overwhelming majority of soldiers do not commit abuses or atrocities, but a few will cross the line of human decency in any war or conflict. And, a majority of people will obey and conform to rules in a new situation. Moreover, in some cases, otherwise compassionate people will perform cruel acts at the behest of an authority figure. For example, in the original Milgram study, it was not merely the case that two thirds of the participants obeyed the experimenter’s orders until the very end. It was also the case that nearly 100 percent of Milgram’s participants delivered a very high level of shock to the victim. That is, even the most compassionate of Milgram’s original participants (those who eventually refused to obey the experimenter’s instructions) delivered what they thought was a 300-volt shock to the victim. No one in the study stopped as soon as we all would like to think any normal person would. So the Milgram study shows that some powerful situations can make anyone perpetrate a cruel act.
Q: How can ordinary people commit brutal, humiliating acts like what we saw from the Abu Ghraib pictures?
A: According to Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who has studied Nazi doctors and Vietnam veterans, everyone has the potential for sadism. He says that sadism is a reaction to the atrocities occurring in one’s environment. “The foot soldiers, MPs and civilian contractors are all caught up in the atrocity-producing situation. They end up adapting to the group and joining in.”
Because of the confusion in Iraq as to who the enemy is, said Lifton, the population and the U.S. military personnel experience a high level of fear, frustration and hostility, which creates a group process of atrocity rather than any kind of individual aberration. xxxx xxxx Abusers undoubtedly viewed their victims as “the enemy.”
Dr. Zimbardo says that everyone has the potential to be good or evil. The human mind can guide us toward anything imaginable, to create heavens or hells on earth. It depends entirely on the special situations in which we might become enmeshed. These young men and women mistreating prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison pictures were embedded in an evil barrel, says Zimbardo.
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Q: How do we prevent these atrocities from occurring again?
A: Zimbardo suggests bringing in experts in military corrections from the U.S. Navy and Airforce and model U.S. prisons. He also suggests releasing the detainees who are not clearly security threats or giving them access to lawyers and human rights services. Listed below are suggestions, according to military and psychological experts, to prevent future Abu Ghraib situations:
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(Compiled from both expert interviews and news sources that include The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The Washington Post, The New York Times and USA Today)
Psychologists Philip Zimbardo, PhD, of Stanford University; Brett Pelham, PhD, Senior Scientist of the American Psychological Association; Steven J. Breckler, PhD, Executive Director of the Science Directorate of the American Psychological Association, contributed their expertise to the Fact Sheet
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Well said.
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