It’s Contagious: Scientists Say Rudeness at Work Acts Like a Virus

If you’re getting annoyed by rudeness at work, you’re likely not going to be the only one.

A new study from the University of Florida says that rudeness in the workplace is contagious, as encountering rude behaviour at work makes people more likely to perceive rudeness in later interactions. As a result, people are more likely to be impolite in return, spreading the contagion of rudeness like a virus.

The study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, and it shows the first evidence of how everyday impoliteness spreads at work. "When you experience rudeness, it makes rudeness more noticeable," said lead author Trevor Foulk, a doctoral student in management at UF's Warrington College of Business Administration. "You'll see more rudeness even if it's not there."

"Part of the problem is that we are generally tolerant of these behaviors, but they're actually really harmful," Foulk said. "Rudeness has an incredibly powerful negative effect on the workplace."

For the study, researchers tracked 90 graduate students who were practicing how to negotiate with classmates. Those students who thought their first partner was rude were more likely to be rated as rude by their next partner, showing that they seemed to have passed on the impoliteness. The study says that this effect of seeming to catch the rudeness continued even when there was a week between the first and second interaction.

Not only can discourtesy be contagious, but impoliteness directed at others can prime people’s brains to detect rudeness. Foulk and his co-authors, fellow doctoral student Andrew Woolum and UF management professor Amir Erez, tested 47 undergraduate students to see how quickly they could identify which words in a list were real and which were nonsense.

Before the exercise started, participants saw one of two staged encounters between the study leader and an apologetic, late-arriving participant. When the leader was rude to the person who was late, the participants identified rude words as real significantly faster than those who saw a neutral interaction.

However, the impact of secondhand rudeness seems to go even further. Those who witness rudeness rather than experiencing it firsthand are still more likely to be rude to someone else. Study participants watched a video of a workplace interaction and then had to answer a neutral-toned customer email. Those who’d watched the rude video were more likely to be hostile in responding than those who’d seen a polite interaction.

"That tells us that rudeness will flavor the way you interpret ambiguous cues," Foulk said. Now, Foulk is hoping employers will take discourtesy more seriously.

"You might go your whole career and not experience abuse or aggression in the workplace, but rudeness also has a negative effect on performance," he said. "It isn't something you can just turn your back on. It matters."