What makes a person nasty and rude?

Hello there guys, I would like to share with you a story that happened a while ago but because I had been so busy, I've not had the chance to blog about it till now but I definitely think it is an interesting case study about human nature. At my gymnastics club, we have a one way system - the gymnasts enter through one door and leave via a different one. This is fairly standard practice during a pandemic to reduce mixing between gymnasts of different classes - we want to also avoid the chaotic situation where the gymnasts from the previous class is trying to leave through the same door where the gymnasts for the next class are trying to come in. A lot of this is common sense of course but sometimes we have parents who refuse to adhere to the rules. So on the evening in question, we had a particularly disruptive parent stand by the entrance so I told him about the one way system and our Covid-protocols. He reused to budge and instead, he deliberately blocked the entrance, refusing to let the gymnasts for the next class enter - he claimed that I had no right to lecture him about Covid and when I said that these were the rules of the sports center, it wasn't me who made the rules and the rules were there to protect everyone including his son. He then claimed that other people had broken the rules by leaving via the exit and he was intent on breaking the rules today - at that point, another coach saw what was happening and tried to get this man's son to leave via the exit but this parent shouted for his son to come to the entrance, he was hell bent on breaking the rules no matter what. There was a sense of, "I'm going to break the rules today, so what are you going to do about it? Ban my son from the gymnastics club? You're gonna call the police to arrest me over this?" 

I went to a senior coach at my gym who was responsible for enforcing a lot of the Covid-protocols to keep our gym Covid-safe during the pandemic to report the incident because I knew she would take the matter very seriously. Let's call her Cynthia (not her real name) and what Cynthia did was contact the parent to warn him that if he broke the rule once more, his son would indeed be banned from the gymnastics club permanently and the following day, I saw that the one-way system was very strictly enforced. Now this would have been the end of the story - one we have heard so many times before: staff members trying to get stupid members of the public to follow Covid rules (such as a one way system or the wearing of masks) and struggling to get idiots to comply with the rules. But there was something that Cynthia said that I want to talk about: she said she knew exactly whom this parent was and because he was rich, he thinks he can get away with breaking the rules and being rude to the staff. This is when I had to say, I think there's a flaw in your logic Cynthia. Now whether or not this man is rich (or not), I don't know and I can't verify - I can only take Cynthia's word for it. However, I disagreed with the way she drew a correlation between him being rich and him being unreasonable and rude. Does being rich automatically turn you into an unreasonable asshole? Does money somehow corrupt our morals so the richer we become, the more evil and nasty we become? No, clearly not - I think Cynthia's reasoning is completely flawed and probably based on anecdotal evidence. So, why would someone like Cynthia make an error of judgement like that? 

My calculated guess is that Cynthia once met a rich person who was rude and unreasonable, so she assumes that all rich people are like that. But imagine if I presented you with the following statement, "I once met a man from Canada who was very tall, so all Canadians are very tall." That's very flawed because I'm basing my assumption on a sample size of one. Likewise, imagine if I ate an orange from Brazil that was very sweet, then I made the statement, "I once enjoyed a very sweet orange from Brazil, therefore all oranges from Brazil are very sweet." In both cases, I was making a sweeping generalization cased on a tiny sample size and thus I am guessing that Cynthia is making the same mistake when trying to ascertain why that parent was so rude and unreasonable. I actually know of someone who is very poor whom I had actually talked about in a recent post - a friend who is a former gymnast 'Charles' is not only totally anti-vaxx, he refuses to wear a mask and follow any kind of Covid-related rules (such as one way systems). I think Charles is like that because he is stuck in a dead-end job working in a delivery depot for packages. He doesn't even get to decide what to wear to work - he has a uniform and he is in the kind of job where he doesn't get to make any decisions, he simply has to follow the instructions of his manager. Thus in this context, for Charles, refusing to follow the rules is more than just an act of defiance, it's his one act of asserting himself - something he simply cannot do at work because he is so low down the food chain. So that's a very poor person equally refusing to follow Covid-related rules, hence both rich and poor people could potentially break Covid rules so that basically just throws Cynthia's theory out of the window - it doesn't hold water. 

Now don't get me wrong, I know Cynthia really well and she is one of the nicest people you would ever meet. Yet somehow, her logic in this case was really flawed. I guess being nice and kind doesn't mean you have perfect social skills that can figure such things out. Likewise, I wrote a piece recently about how frustrated I got with my sister when she made a ridiculous assumption - she was simply a kind person who assumed that everyone would be somehow equally nice (yeah right, as if). But if I may refer you back to that unreasonable parent who refused to follow the one-way system in my gym, why do some people indulge in this kind of behaviour then? Well, my theory is that we often follow examples that we grew up with and often people with poor social skills simply default to what they are familiar with rather than question is there is a better way to do things. Allow me to share a case study: I was at an airport waiting for my flight when another flight was delayed because of bad weather at the destination - I was not on the delayed flight, my flight happened to be on the next gate along so I saw the reaction of the angry and frustrated passengers. One man went up to the lady at the airline counter and started shouting angrily at her, "I'm being delayed by over three hours, I'm going to miss my connection in Frankfurt so what are you going to do about it?" The lady simply kept her cool but given the abuse she was getting from the irate passenger, she wasn't exactly motivated to go out of her way to try to help him solve his problem - she simply told him to contact the airline's staff in Frankfurt when he got there and they'd deal with him, there was nothing she could do from London. He demanded an upgrade but she said sorry, I can't do that on the system here. 

This other passenger, an older lady, witnessed the incident went up to the lady at the counter and comforted her, "I saw what happened, that guy was totally unreasonable - are you alright? Don't let him get to you, of course the delay was not your fault, he shouldn't have spoken to you like that. I know you're trying your best already." This older lady established rapport with the airline employee effortlessly, in a very short space of time by simply being very nice. Within a few minutes, the older lady actually asked for an upgrade and the lady behind the counter said, "I really shouldn't do this but okay, let me print you a new boarding pass." So the first man vented his anger at the member of staff but failed to realize that such behaviour wouldn't win him any friends whilst it was obvious that the second lady was far more skilled in dealing with such situations and she knew how to use her social skills to persuade people to give her what she wanted. Did the first man not realize that his behaviour wasn't going to get him what he wanted? If someone had explained to him that the best way to get what he wanted was to be polite and nice, would he have behaved differently? Those are hypothetical questions of course, but my guess is that he must have seen other people behave like that in the past and gotten away with it - that was why he must have been convinced that being rude and abusive like that would have been the best course of action under such circumstances. Perhaps he had parents who behaved like that, who shouted at him whenever they wanted to do something, rather than try to reason with him why he needed to comply with their requests. 

By that token, the only logical conclusion we can reach is that people who behave in a rude and unreasonable manner (thus alienating and offending those around them) have poor social skills - nobody has ever taught them how to get what they want by being nice and thus they default to the only way they know how to behave. Now it doesn't matter whether you're rich or poor, I've seen both rich and poor people with terrible social skills - I've also seen both rich and poor people with good social skills. There is really little correlation between wealth and social skills but it seems that Cynthia has this hypothesis in her head that "rich people will look down on poor people and treat them badly", thus she was looking for evidence that matched her hypothesis. Whereas my hypothesis is a more general one: people with poor social skills will often make very poor choices when dealing with others and so two things happen: they end up behaving badly and they may not get the outcome they want (like the angry passenger at the airport). I often go on and on about social skills as I think it is so important yet people tend not to focus enough on it and when people like Cynthia start blaming bad behaviour on wealth rather than the lack of good social skills to resolve any kind of disputes, I just have to shake my head and say, "wealth has nothing to do with the matter at all, it is simply a red herring." The question is, does Cynthia have enough humility to question her own judgement on the issue or does she simply assume that she is 100% right on her take on the matter? Do I know her well enough to challenge her on the matter, or should I just let sleeping dogs lie? 

I'd like to end with one question that Amanda asked me - after all, I had grown up with severely autistic parents who would shout at me and threaten me with punishments if they wanted me to do something. I'll give you an example: we all know how parents struggle to get their children to eat vegetables. My parents would say, "if you don't eat all of those vegetables, I'll beat you up." So to avoid getting a beating, I'll have to do whatever was asked of me. If that meant eating vegetables, so be it. In contrast, more enlightened parents would try to use reason to convince their children that vegetables are healthy, they are an important part of our diet and some parents might even make the effort to find out which kinds of vegetables their children liked and how they are prepared in order to get them to eat more vegetables. Whilst I ate my vegetables as a child, I received no information or education from my parents about the importance of vegetables, probably because they didn't understand  the issue from a nutritional point of view - it was something they were told they had to do by the doctors. Despite my parents setting a bad example, I somehow ended up more like the nice older lady who knew how to get what she wanted at the airport? A lot of people have made the incorrect assumption that my parents had taught me well but as Amanda quite correctly observed, I ended up like that in spite of my parents, rather than because of my parents. She is right though in that many people do end up becoming a lot like their parents because of the way they were brought up; their childhood will have a huge impact on the adults they eventually become. 

The answer is simple: I observe, I learn and I don't make the same mistake twice. Let me give you a simple example. I buy pastries like croissants from the supermarket and I like to heat them up in the microwave just before eating so they are hot. If I zap the croissant for 60 seconds in the microwave and then burn it, naturally my reaction would be to think, "okay that was too long, so next time I should reduce it to just 30 seconds or even 20 seconds." So I have found that for just one pastry, 20 seconds would suffice. Now that seems like common sense of course - what kind of idiot do you have to be to keep zapping the pastry for 60 seconds and burning it each time? What kind of idiot would not learn from their mistakes? I'm sure you've heard this quote before: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Therefore when I see my parents make mistakes, my natural reaction is to apply some common sense and think, "well that was a dumb mistake, it clearly didn't work so I would take a different approach to try to get a better outcome." Now whether or not my parents feel the same way is irrelevant, the fact that I am able to come up with that response is simply because I have enough common sense - a lot more than my parents actually. You would have to be really stupid to blindly copy a bad role model but unfortunately, there are some people out there who have bad parents and for some reason they simply blindly followed those really terrible examples they have witnessed growing up. 

Then again, I have used an extremely simple example - after all, practically anyone can learn how to reheat a pastry in a microwave but developing good social skills to relate to people around you is actually a lot harder. Heck, I'm sure I can even someone like my severely autistic mother can figure out how to use the microwave to reheat her pastries but it takes a lot more emotional intelligence to try to figure out how to manipulate people into give you what you want. There are a thousand and one reasons why someone might not learn from their mistakes - perhaps they just shove it into a massive blind spot, perhaps they don't even realize they are making a mistake, perhaps they need extra help to correct these mistakes but don't have access to the help they need, perhaps they feel that they don't need to change their ways and they just don't care. But the bottom line is there are a whole range of reasons why someone may turn out to be a nasty piece of work and we should be open minded about that when we encounter someone nasty rather than do what Cynthia did, which was to make an assumption based on her personal prejudice against rich people. So that's it from me on this topic, what do you think? Have you met people like Cynthia before who tend to look for confirmation bias in anything they come across? What would you do if you witnessed someone like Cynthia doing this - would you try to challenge them or would you simply let sleeping dogs lie? What about you, do you think you're sometimes guilty of making this mistake as well and so what do you do avoid this? Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.