The Serious Dangers of Being Rude
I watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy. Honestly, it’s embarrassing. So when I read the piece “Rudeness in Medical Settings Could Kill Patients” on Science of Us earlier this week, my first thought was, Wow, I wonder how anyone at Seattle Grace Hospital survived. After all, the premise of the show is essentially people sleeping with each other, then being rude to each other later in the operating room.
What struck me about the piece most, though, wasn’t the Grey’s Anatomy inaccuracies it brought to mind, but how the discussion could easily apply to everyday life, outside of a medical setting. The Science of Us piece talks about a recent study, published in Pediatrics, which found that a simple rude comment from a third-party doctor took a huge toll on the performance of doctors and nurses in a simulated life-or-death situation. And by huge, I mean the teams’ abilities to properly diagnose the condition were impacted by 52 percent, compared with teams working in rude-comment-free environments, and how well they treated the condition was impacted by 43 percent. As the study’s author, Amir Erez, points out, these differences in treating the patient could have been fatal, were it a real-life situation.
As Erez suggests, rudeness could be a contributing factor to the large number of preventable deaths caused by medical error — a scary 210,000 to 444,000 lives — in the U.S. each year. And okay, okay, we don’t all work in high-stress environments where one “Ugh, you are so incompetent” could mean a person dying in front of you. But that doesn’t mean that your rude comments, which you might think innocuous, aren’t having a dramatic effect on other people’s lives, both in work and outside of it.
As Erez told Science of Us, “We found that rudeness damages your ability to think, manage information and make decisions. You can be highly motivated to work, but if rudeness damages your cognitive system, then you can’t function appropriately in a complex situation.” This is because — and I’m sure we can all relate — when someone insults you or is rude to you, you use your mental resources to process why the heck they were so rude to you, which takes mental resources away from the task at hand, causing a dip in performance. So to apply this to a situation that you have probably witnessed, a rude comment to someone in a meeting at work could completely throw them off and cause them to fumble throughout the rest of the conversation.
What’s my point, you ask? Well, while the study was focused on the dramatic effects rudeness has on medical settings, I think it’s worth noting how rudeness — something we are all familiar with, and probably (definitely) responsible for sometimes — actually impacts the receiver and the people surrounding them. For instance, a rude comment to a server in a busy restaurant, a high-stress environment in its own right, could cause the server to screw up their next table’s order, which could affect their service to the rest of their customers for the night, which could mean those customers go home with a terrible dining experience under their belts and the server goes home with a lot less money in their pocket. Point being, a knee-jerk comment, little as a it may seem, could have a pretty large ripple effect.
So let’s all be a little more thoughtful and a little less rude, because science shows, tiny rude comments can have big consequences. Better yet, in the theme of last week’s Day of Kindness, let’s all just be nicer, just because it feels good. And if you’re a doctor, please take no cues from Grey’s Anatomy. Please.
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