Psychological incivility research update: Incivility is bad for rationality

A 55 minute segment of the Hidden Brain program that NPR broadcasts weekly focuses on social science related to incivility. Rudeness is toxic to the human mind. The effects are subtle but surprisingly powerful and often lingering. The interviewer is Shankar Vedantam and he speaks with researcher Christine Porath.

One part of the transcript, starting at 16:04:

Shankar Vedantam: I want to examine both the immediate effects of incivility on the mind, as well as some of these long-term effects that you're talking about. You say that instability can hijack the amygdala. What do you mean by this, Christine?

Christine Porath: Well, I think it means that we're flooded with emotions and that's when kind of this idea of fight or flight gear kicks in. And it leads to us, for many people, being paralyzed almost in terms of not being able to respond to things, or not being able to react or make changes that would help us in that moment. It's almost as if we can't cope with the situation because we're struggling to process things. And so one way that I think about this is like the storm inside your brain.

Shankar Vedantam: Christina has conducted many studies into the effects of incivility, one of them builds on a famous psychological experiment. Volunteers are asked to watch a video of people rapidly passing a basketball. Right in the middle of the game, a person wearing a gorilla suit walks through the middle of the frame. Many volunteers fail to notice the gorilla because they're so focused on the ball being passed.

Shankar Vedantam: In Christine's experiment, she exposed a subset of volunteers to incivility before they watched the video.

Christine Porath: They were five times less likely to see the gorilla on the screen and that really surprised us but also with other studies, what we found is that it took people a lot longer to answer questions, to solve anagrams, word jumbles, to create words. They had much more difficulty doing that kind of thing, so cognitive performance went down significantly, roughly about 30% across different studies. And even their physical moves to answer questions, that was slower. It seemed to be affecting people in all sorts of ways and what's interesting also is that people weren't aware of this.

Shankar Vedantam: There's been some work that you and others have done looking at the effects of incivility on memory. What do you find?

Christine Porath: We find that when people witness rudeness, they are far less likely to be able to remember things. They make a lot more errors. We measured this with math errors. We measured this with performance errors on cognitive tests and the differences were really stunning with just seeing this or being around it.

Shankar Vedantam: Hmm. You've even found that incivility has effects on our creativity, which I found really surprising. What do you find, Christine?

Christine Porath: Yeah. We find again, whether you experience incivility, whether you witness it, it decreases your ability to come up with creative ideas. In some of the tests, we give them this study where they come up with as many ideas for what to do with a brick as possible, and we code it for dysfunctional ideas as well as how creative the ideas are. What we find is the people that were exposed to rudeness, they come up with really dysfunctional responses for what you do with a brick. They'll say things like, "break someone's nose," "smash someone's fingers," "beat or crush a person to death," "sink a body in a river," "throw it through a window," "place it on the floor to stub people's toe," or something like that.

Shankar Vedantam: It almost seems as if people are coming up with creative uses for the brick that are somewhat aggressive.

Christine Porath: Yeah, scary aggressive. It was just stunning to see the ideas that people came up with because really all that they were exposed to was just one quick incident. It was like a fleeting moment that they were exposed to and somehow this is what they came up with.

Shankar Vedantam: Why do you think rudeness has these effects on creativity, both in some ways limiting how creative we can be, but also perhaps exacerbating this kind of aggressive creativity?

Christine Porath: I think it ties to the hijacking people's focus and attention and the lack of awareness around that. People become much more self-focused, much less other-focused and I think our mind is wrapped up on replaying the incident, where they're not focusing on the task nearly as much. They're overwhelmed by other thoughts and so it's very hard to think about anything else.