Good manners really do ‘cost nothing and buy everything’, even in today’s increasingly polarised politics.
Whatever your political affiliations, it would seem difficult to deny that politics has become less civil over the last decade. Perhaps it’s thanks to social media, which gives us more direct access to the thoughts of the people in power, but never before has a sitting US President so regularly described opponents as being “crooked”, “crazy”, “psycho” or a “phoney”.
Do these kinds of personal insults hinder a politician’s standing in the public? Or do they simply signal a dominant personality and commitment to their goals – strengthening their support base? Take the Kavanaugh hearing, which only emphasised the deep political divides afflicting countries such as the US. After the then-nominee to the US Supreme Court gave testimony described as an angry “call to arms” and which he later characterised himself as “sharp” and “very emotional”, Gallup polls found that there was no change in the percentage of Americans who were for versus against his confirmation. But there was a dramatic drop in the number of people who formerly had been undecided.
Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court a little more than a week later. It’s possible that in this kind of climate, it no longer pays to pull your punches.
Jeremy Frimer at the University of Winnipeg and Linda Skitka at the University of Illinois at Chicago have recently explored whether this is the case. And their results, published recently in one of social psychology’s top academic journals, are surprising.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu famously argued that ‘civility costs nothing and buys everything’
Frimer and Skitka examined two hypotheses. The first is named the “Montagu Principle”, after the 18th-Century English aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who famously argued that “civility costs nothing and buys everything”. According to the Montagu Principle, rudeness should only harm a politician’s ratings.
As an alternative, the researchers proposed the “red meat hypothesis”, in which they liken a…
