Members in the Media
From: Yahoo! Canada

Kind Words Can Lead to Harsh Consequences

Yahoo! Canada:

Politeness has a place, but not in high-stakes situations, according to researchers.

Whether a pilot is making an emergency flight or a doctor is trying to help a patient make a surgical decision, the sort of vague, evasive responses that help us avoid hurting someone’s feelings can have disastrous consequences, according to a team of scientists, including Jean-François Bonnefon and Wim de Neys of the National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Toulouse in France, and Aidan Feeney of Queen’s University in the United Kingdom.

The more sensitive an issue, the more polite we tend to become, according to the researchers.

But, because it can require us to become evasive and vague, politeness can have a downside: It can lead to uncertainty about what the polite person is actually saying. As a result, we have to spend more mental resources trying to parse the actual meaning, the researchers write in their review of past studies on politeness in the October issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Read the whole story: Yahoo! Canada

More of our Members in the Media >


APS regularly opens certain online articles for discussion on our website. Effective February 2021, you must be a logged-in APS member to post comments. By posting a comment, you agree to our Community Guidelines and the display of your profile information, including your name and affiliation. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations present in article comments are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of APS or the article’s author. For more information, please see our Community Guidelines.

Please login with your APS account to comment.