To be clear I agree with the benefits of politeness, and also think people probably *underweight* the benefits of politeness because they’re less easy to see. (And, further, there’s a selection effect that people who are ‘rude’ are disproportionately likely to be ones who find politeness unusually costly or difficult to understand, and have less experience with its benefits.)
This is one of the reasons I like an injunction that’s closer to “show the other person how to be polite to you” than “deal with it yourself”; often the person who ‘didn’t see how to word it any other way’ will look at your script and go “oh, I could have written that,” and sometimes you’ll notice that you’re asking them to thread a very narrow needle or are objecting to the core of their message instead of their tone.
To be clear I agree with the benefits of politeness, and also think people probably *underweight* the benefits of politeness because they’re less easy to see. (And, further, there’s a selection effect that people who are ‘rude’ are disproportionately likely to be ones who find politeness unusually costly or difficult to understand, and have less experience with its benefits.)
This is one of the reasons I like an injunction that’s closer to “show the other person how to be polite to you” than “deal with it yourself”; often the person who ‘didn’t see how to word it any other way’ will look at your script and go “oh, I could have written that,” and sometimes you’ll notice that you’re asking them to thread a very narrow needle or are objecting to the core of their message instead of their tone.