Be Nice

Be Kind. Rewind.

As the father of a toddler, I have become intensely aware of and sensitive to my responsibility in providing this little human with a moral and social foundation upon which she will be able to not only build a fulfilling life, but also get along well with others. It’s usually the first thing on my mind when I wake up and the last thing I’m thinking about as I drift off to sleep. And, after a whopping 17-months of experience, I can confirm that identifying and distilling life’s greatest lessons into toddler-sized bites is a challenge.

Fortunately, for me and all parents of young children, there are a handful of moral and social teachings that stand out as obvious, lessons that we have all agreed should be taught and are therefore universally accepted. These are the lessons that are taught with great consistency across social contexts, from the home and family context, to the playground context, to the school context, and so on. Robert Fulghum’s classic collection of essays, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, highlights many of these very lessons: share, clean up after yourself, live a balanced life, etc.

Without minimizing the importance of those lessons that are focused on the moral aspects of living a fulfilling and good life, I find myself drawn to those lessons that revolve around how to interact with others, around the social aspect of getting along in the world. As a parent (so far) I have focused a bit more on lessons like encouraging my daughter to smile and say hello/goodbye to people, to share and take turns, to not hit or bite other people, etc. When I step back and look at these lessons collectively, it appears to me that they can broadly be grouped together under the umbrella social lesson of “be nice” to others.

Thanks to its universal acceptance, it’s stating the obvious that we should teach our children to “be nice”. Few of life’s lessons will serve them as well as they grow up and learn to make their way in the world. One of the more clever ways we’ve learned to communicate the value of being nice is through the magic of the children’s fable. “Be nice” (or something close to it) is the key take away in countless beloved children’s fables, to name just a few:

• The Man and the Little Cat — Be kind, even the other person hurts you
• Aesop’s The Lion and the Mouse — Be merciful
• The Wet Pants — Be sympathetic

Sadly, as with many of the things we learned in kindergarten, “be nice” gets easily lost in the hectic shuffle of adulthood. One needs to look no further than the current rhetoric echoed every night on TV, Facebook and Twitter, on either side of the political spectrum, to see just how far adults can stray from being nice to each other. Worse, we may be losing touch with each other altogether. Everywhere you look, people choose to bury their attention in the apps on their cell phones and shelter themselves from the sounds of the world around them with AirPods or Beats headphones. We are becoming too distracted to even see each other, let alone be nice to one another.

When we do peel our faces away from our little screens, we find reminders to “be nice” scattered throughout our lives.

• For those old enough to remember, the box a rented video came in often reminded the user to “Be Kind. Rewind.”
• Seats on planes, trains & automobiles are saved for the handicapped, elderly & pregnant, as an example of legally-mandated niceness.
• Religions the world over periodically encourage us to “do unto others”, maintaining the sentiment as central to their gospel. Do unto others is another way of saying, “be nice because you like when others are nice to you”
• Companies that you have probably worked for regularly host training seminars and workshops that teach leaders to use communications tools like the “nice sandwich” when providing others with constructive criticism

Without these intermittent reminders, it’s likely that our individual lives would further devolve towards singular focus on our self-interest. However, there is at least one area in which we remain instinctively nice to each other, one area where we don’t need to be reminded.

When directly interacting with each other, we will usually default to being nice. Here are a few examples of situations you’ve probably been in, to give you a flavor for the type of interactions I’m talking about:

• If you’ve ever tipped more than you should have for bad service, you have defaulted to being nice
• If you’ve ever compliment things you didn’t really like that much, you have defaulted to being nice
• If you’ve ever told someone they did a good job when they didn’t, you have defaulted to being nice

Of course we have all been in these situations and defaulted to being nice, this response is universal to the human condition. But why? Why is it we instinctively default to being nice when directly interacting with one another?

Courtesy Bias

In the lexicon of behavioral science, these instinctual “be nice to avoid awkwardness” responses are what’s known as a Courtesy Bias. It’s the tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one’s true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone.

This Courtesy Bias concept is a driver behind of one of the key influence factors identified by Robert Cialdini in his seminal book on persuasion, Influence. Liking, as he calls it, is the phenomenon that people prefer to say yes to those that they like, and they do so for three reasons:

• We like people who are similar to us
• We like people who pay us compliments
• We like people who cooperate with us towards mutual goals

What we’re specifically talking about with regards to the courtesy bias is the affinity we feel for those that compliment us. (The others, while obviously related and important, are topics for another day.) Socially, we prefer to be in situations and with people that flatter us, that make us look, sound and feel good. It’s the social bit that makes this all work.

So, as best as anyone can tell, we instinctively default to being nice during interaction to avoid making said interaction awkward. Many would argue that our most base instinct is a selfish one, that of looking out for ourselves. But having realized success as an extremely social species, we’ve learned the equal value of getting along with and being nice to others.

As we discussed in a previous article, we literally cannot survive on our own. We need to get along with others for both individual advancement and social cohesion. We seek validation and affirmation from our social group(s) that we are good, in order to calm our nerves about the possibility of being ostracized from the group. Further, Darwin himself went so far as to claim, “A tribe of people who were always ready to aid one another would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.” Simply put, we have evolved to be nice as a success strategy.

Niceness as naturally selected success strategy would explain quite a bit:

• The good feelings we get when giving and receiving help.
• What psychologists call the helper’s high
• Why neuroscientists find that generosity activates reward centers in our brains.

In fact, the more behavioral science illuminates our propensity for being nice, the more we realize we’ve known of the importance of niceness for quite a while.

“If you don’t have anything nice to say…”

Idioms championing the virtue of being nice were abundant way back in ancient Sumer, humanity’s first great city:

• “A good word is a friend to numerous men.”
• “He hurled his insult. He laid his curse.”
• “A heart never created hatred; speech created hatred.”
• “A sweet word is everybody’s friend.”

Perhaps niceness sayings were popular back then because, all those generations of social evolution ago, we were just beginning to appreciate the value of being nice to each other.

Here’s one of the Old Testament’s most plainly-stated niceness takes:

• “A gentle word turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”

Proving that, even with a few millennia under our societal belts, niceness is still a work in progress.

Today, even further down our social evolution timeline, we still remind each other to be nice in the same fundamental ways, through the power of idioms & verbal memes:

• “Kind words are like honey, sweet to the soul and healthy for the body.”
• “You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.”
• “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

Bottom Line

Somewhere along the way I came across the metaphor of the emotional “bank account” as simple but profound way to classify our interactions with each other. Basically, interactions will either add to or take away from our emotional bank account (again, we are simplifying).

Given our most base selfish interests, there are infinite ways in which we will take from each other, but we have few ingrained ways in which to give to each other. The Courtesy Bias, hardwired through the dynamic of natural selection, is one of those few biases that ensure we add to each other’s emotional bank accounts. It’s a way for us to re-balance the debits & credits of our interactions with one another. I like this concept.

Needless to say, the Courtesy Bias is a big deal, and not just for social cohesion and individual feelings of fulfillment. Learning to get along with others has proven to be a core strategy in becoming materially successful, as well. According to a recent Atlantic article, children that were taught to “be nice” go on to enjoy more supportive relationships and were significantly less likely to suffer from depression. In addition, generous and “nice” people go on to earn higher incomes, get promoted more, and receive better performance reviews.

Better relationships? Feel better more often? AND make more money?! I’m convinced. Now, if you’ll excuse me for just a second, I have something to say to my daughter real quick: “Hey sweetheart. You make sure you be nice at daycare today, okay?”