Do Nice People Finish Last or Best: Christine Porath (Full Transcript)

Following is the full text of author Christine Porath’s talk titled “Do Nice People Finish Last or Best?” at TEDxUniversityofNevada conference. In this TEDx Talk, Christine Porath shares the costs of incivility and how civility pays. She explains how incivility is a bug — it’s contagious and we become carriers of it just by being around it. Christine Porath is author of Mastering Civility and co-author of The Cost of Bad Behavior.

Christine Porath – TEDx Talk TRANSCRIPT

Who do you want to be?

It’s a simple question, and whether you know it or not, you are answering it every day through your actions.

This one question will define your professional success more than any other. Because how you show up and treat people means everything.

Either you lift people up by respecting them, making them feeling valued, appreciated and heard, or you hold people down by making them feel small, insulted, disregarded or excluded.

And who you choose to be means everything. I studied the effects of incivility on people.

WHAT IS INCIVILITY?

It’s disrespect or rudeness. It includes a lot of different behaviors, from mocking or belittling someone to teasing people in ways that sting, to telling offensive jokes to texting in meetings.

And what’s uncivil to one person maybe absolutely fine to another. Take texting while someone is speaking to you. Someone of us may find it rude, others may think it’s absolutely civil. So it really depends.

It is all in the eyes of the beholder and whether that person felt disrespected. We may not mean to make someone feel that way, but when we do, it has consequences.

Over 22 years ago, I vividly recall walking into this stuffy hospital room. It was heart-breaking to see my dad, this strong, athletic, energetic guy lying in a bed with electrodes strapped to his bare chest. What put him there was work-related stress.

For over a decade, he suffered an uncivil boss. And for me, I thought he was just an outlier at that time.

But just a couple of years later, I witnessed and experienced a lot of incivility in my first job out of college. I spent a year going to work every day and hearing things from co-workers like, “Are you an idiot? That’s not how it’s done.” And ”If I wanted your opinion, I’d ask.”

So I did the natural thing: I quit. And I went back to grad school to study the effects of this. And there I met Christine Pearson, and she had a theory that small uncivil actions can lead to much bigger problems, like aggression and violence. We believed that incivility affected performance in the bottom line.

So we launched a study, and what we found was eye-opening. We sent a survey to business school alumni working in all different organizations, and we asked them to write a few sentences about one experience where they were treated rudely, disrespectfully or insensitively and to answer questions about how they reacted.

One person told us about a boss that made insulting statements, like, ”That’s kindergartener’s work.” And another tore up someone’s work in front of the entire team.

And what we found is that incivility made people less motivated. 66% cut back work efforts, 80% lost time worrying about what happened, and 12% left their job.

And after we published these results, two things happened: One, we got calls from organizations. Cisco read about these numbers, took just a few of these and estimated conservatively incivility was costing them $12 million a year.

The second thing that happened was that we heard from others in our academic field, who said, ”People are reporting this, but how can you really show it? Does people’s performance really suffer?”

I was curious about that, too. With Amir Erez, I compared those that experienced incivility to those that didn’t experience incivility. And what we found is that those that experience incivility do actually function much worse.

“OK,” you may say. “This makes sense. After all, it’s natural that their performance suffers. But what about if you are not the one who experiences it? What if you just see or hear it?” You’re a witness.

We wondered if it affected witnesses, too. So we conducted studies where five participants would witness an experimenter act rudely to someone who arrived late to the study.

The experimenter said, ”What is it with you? You arrived late, you are irresponsible. Look at you! How do you expect to hold a job in real world?” In another study in a small group, we tested the effects of a peer insulting a group member.

Now, what we found was really interesting because witnesses’ performance decreased, too. And not just marginally, quite significantly.

Incivility is a bug, it’s contagious, and we become carriers of it just by being around it. And this isn’t confined to the workplace. We can catch this virus anywhere: at home, online, in schools and in our communities. It affects our emotions, our motivation, our performance and how we treat others.

It even affects our attention and can take some of our brain power. And this happens not only if we experience incivility or we witness it. It can happen even if we just see or read rude words.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. To test this, we gave people combinations of words to use to make a sentence. But we were very sneaky.

Half the participants got a list with 15 words used to trigger rudeness: “impolitely,” “interrupt,” “obnoxious,” “bother.”

Half the participants received a list of words with none of these rude triggers.

And what we found was really surprising because the people who got the rude words were five times more likely to miss information right in front of them on the computer screen.

And as we continued this research, what we found is that those that read the rude words took longer to make decisions, to record their decisions, and they made significantly more errors. This can be a big deal, especially when it comes to life and death situations.

Steve, a physician, told me about a doctor that he worked with, who was never very respectful, especially to junior staff and nurses. But Steve told me about this one particular interaction where this doctor shouted at a medical team.