"Faking nice" over "making nice" is pretty common in online communities too.
1) A person-turned-abuser sees an opportunity to abuse an undeserving bystander.
2) The abuser takes it, using polite-sounding, civil language as a smokescreen.
3) Some commenters will point out the malice in the abuser's tone.
4) The abuser furiously spams the thread, claiming clear & good intentions. The abuser may even pretend to apologize to the abused.
5) Months later, the abuser only remembers "both sides were wrong" or the abused "kind of deserved it"
The relevant quote is "Propriety is the least of all laws, but the most obeyed." If a person offends the group's vague sense of manners, that person risks being condemned and ostracized. But if a person can cloak their action under a thin veneer of respectability (propriety), they can do quite a bit, even harm a fellow human being, without being detected.
Quite possible. Though, playing devil's advocate, I wonder if requiring propriety still manages to filter out the majority of bad actors.
I certainly see a decent number of commenters who are clearly rude and not making an effort to cover it, whose comments wouldn't pass muster even if they weren't rude, and getting modded away. (There's also some amount of rudeness that looks reasonable to the political tribe being rude, which generally remains in place; it's hard to establish objective-seeming norms around this so I'll set that aside.) Lastly, I can think of only one recognizable commenter who I'm pretty sure was acting like a deliberate troll on a few occasions: starting out with what I'm pretty sure he knew was a straw man argument, and then using his rhetorical skill to just mess with the people arguing back, rather than making a coherent point.
* Figure out a good way not to hire a 2-faced asshole, because it ain't easy to fix.
* Making someone change their normal behavior may deplete their energy in the short-term, and they'll come off as fake. So, if you're after that, go full on Pygmalion, and give it some time to set in; some crap two-week HR course won't cut it.
* Be yourself. It's less work and you'll come off as more real.
People are complex, with many facets. Sometimes they act one way, sometimes they act another, and both of those can be true to the good, flawed, and inconsistent being that we are. We have better sides, and they are just as a part of ourselves as our flawed sides.
I'm not 100% certain but I think often times people who are the biggest assholes are usually that way precisely because they're afraid of being themselves
Fairly simple example, but assuming a little bit of nature in the nature vs. nurture argument there are probably a fair number of men out there who get a real kick out of being violent. I encourage them not to 'be yourself' except in some very specific circumstances.
A much better strategy than 'be yourself' is 'try to understand why other people think you are wrong'. That is a strategy that can improve over time. 'Be yourself' literally locks in whatever mistakes a person is already making.
Not going to judge anyone who goes with 'be yourself' but let the record show it is a bad way to approach life unless a body is very lucky in who their self is.
> Do you really believe 'be yourself' is a suggestion to be a jerk if you are a jerk?
It is advice. There is a real risk that advice is going to be taken litearlly
If "be yourself" is a metaphor of some sort that means "assess if your personality needs change and then change it if you are a jerk" then that needs to be what people say in the first place. And realistically even then 'jerk' is too abstract. This is advice that requires psychic powers to interpret and as such is bad advice.
As someone who was occasionally afflicted by this for a while...yes, 1000x yes. My outcomes in complicated situations building over long time spans has completely changed the last year or two because now I choose to be an _incremental_ asshole.
i.e. I speak up much earlier than I used to, when I thought it'd be 'mean', preventing things from deviating so far from my comfort zone that eventually I need to address everything I was uncomfortable with, all at once.
Be yourself is a good advice even if you are a dick. Maybe not good for you persobally but for everyone else so they know early they should steer clear of you and never get attached to you.
I think it’s more important to accept who you are. Just pretending isn’t going to change anything, maybe deep mental health therapy can change you in some ways, but just pretending is exhausting and people will be able to tell.
It is very important to accept who you are, and you can simultaneously accept who you are capable of becoming because that is equally who you are.
For example, if you feel deep inside that you want to be an athlete, well that's a part of who you are, even if you're obese. You can embrace that by working toward becoming an athlete. Start living like an athlete in ways that you can.
In corporate situations this is a lot less ambiguous, where if you want to be promoted then you have to do the work of at least 1 rank above yourself before you're officially at that level.
If you feel like you're pretending and it's exhausting, then it either means you're not being true to yourself (you're not meant to become that) or you're suffering from imposter syndrome.
People are often jerks because it "works". It gets them what they want.
Your job as the jerk supervisor is let them know that being a jerk will not get them way they want. It will tarnish their reputation, diminish their credibility and eventually get them isolated, demoted or fired.
Promoting a jerk is equivalent to detonating a nuclear bomb in your company. It tells everyone that the way to get promoted is being toxic, therefore everyone will become toxic. It will also make ethical people give up on your company and leave.
> Specifically, impression management tactics have been linked to greater subsequent daily cognitive depletion, exhaustion, anxiety, work-family conflict, and sleep (Klotz et al., 2018; Wagner et al., 2014), while potentially being deceptive to the supervisor themselves (Conger, 1990). Supervisors who engage in abusive episodes not only experience greater daily image concerns, but in attempting to resolve those concerns with daily impression management tactics, are likely to generate greater personal exhaustion, anxiety, and work-to-family hardships (Wagner et al., 2014). While it would be most beneficial for organizations to integrate training initiatives that aid supervisors to develop better interpersonal and leadership skills as a
means of curtailing abusive episodes in the first place (Tepper, 2000), * it would also be advantageous for organizations to provide support for leaders that have engaged in abusive episodes to more effectively cope with the image concerns they experience as a result of mistreating their employees. *
Emphasis mine. This is the one sentence in the research paper that made me scratch my head.
Cool to see a study like this, but of course it's not meant to be a ground-breaking new discovery. It's well-studied that abusive, grandiose people are people with intense anxiety that are very difficult to heal because of their grandiosity (see narcissists)
There are so many studies on this topic all trying to find the right words hoping to finally convince us: anxious/grandiose people will never change inside (without years-long therapy), they will only change their tactics once they've been found out. So if this happens in a work environment fire them immediately once discovered, or leave your company if you can't fire them - you will not find a way to fix these people or learn how to cope with them yourself just do it.
>So, anxious people (depressed or grandiose) feel they have to lie, manipulate, abuse to stay where they are at
As someone who has anxiety and knows several people with anxiety, this has not been my experience at all. Like I am probably in a lower paying job than I should be despite my performance because I am too anxious to ask for a raise or interview around. I am not good enough socially to manipulate people, if I had those skills I would probably not be anxious. I have learned at a very young age to treat people very well because I need long term relationships, I can't quickly charm someone new if destroy my current relationships. My anxiety makes my sensitive not just to criticism but toward the feelings of others. Some anxious people are assholes just like some charming people are. But most are just normal people trying to play the hand they were dealt.
I came across an interesting factoid on Lex Fridman's interview with Andrew Huberman - of the 'fight, flight, freeze' trifecta, freeze is actually associated with the lowest level of anxiety. Fight - or any action that involves moving towards the stressor - is associated with the highest level of anxiety, though it also causes massive dopamine releases when the result is positive.
So thin-skinned narcissists that aggressively climb status hierarchies are probably much more anxious than yourself. I don't have an opinion on what you should do with that information, but I think it's interesting.
I don't know why I wrote the first paragraph, I was groggy and I can't comprehend what I was thinking originally. The point I was trying to make is that lay people cannot heal intense anxiety, and workplace abuses are evidence of that intense anxiety. So HR should always immediately fire workplace abusers simply on the fact that the abuser cannot be healed by HR and they will not improve despite their best efforts, which seems to be the conclusion that all the scientific papers on abusers are trying to help us go towards. I had an abusive boss in the past and their intense anxiety/insecurity/whatever you call it is maddening.
He is not saying that people with anxiety are abusive he is saying that abusive people are often have anxiety, i.e. a subset of anxious people try to cope with their anxiety by being grandiose and abusing.
Symptoms of anxiety disorders do not include lying, manipulating, or abuse. You're pathologizing shitty behavior when the truth is that some people do bad things for reasons that have nothing to do with mental illness.
It’s interesting, I couldn’t find anything in the symptom list, but I was reading something about men and anxiety.
I’ve seen some speculation by physiologists that anxiety is often unrecognized in men, because it often causes anger. People just think they’re dealing with another angry man, but it’s really a manifestation of someone who’s scared, and only has limited ways to express it.
Of course this doesn’t excuse any bad behavior. It seems highly likely to me that much of this bad behavior is caused by mental illness. Yet, we insist against this, because of mores regarding personal responsibility.
I'm trying to establish the link between shitty behavior and intense anxiety - which I assume most people in the mental health world would agree that intense feelings of anxiety underlie most bad behavior. I'm not saying if you've ever felt anxious you need to take all the drugs.
But this type of intense anxiety, from which most workplace abuses manifest, cannot be easily healed. So if you see abuses at your company, fire the offender or leave. Don't let HR think they can simply heal the abuser it won't happen as every study has shown.
This is a common myth about abuse. Abusers act they way they do because their behavior gets them what they want, not because they're driven to abuse by mental illness. Some abusers would like you to believe that, however, because it shifts the blame for their behavior away from them and ultimately gets them what they want.
I don’t think this is really true. Stuff I’ve read from psychologists say the opposite. It’s actually really controversial, and people are debating what role therapy should play in abuse cases.
I don’t think a link to mental illness is even really disputed anymore. They’ve actually started screening people out of traditional programs, due to mental illness and drug addiction in criminal abuse cases. I’m trying to say away from the hairy politics here, as it can get quite heated.
My understanding is that is complicated, and in many cases it's involuntary.
Sociopaths are abusers because they utterly lack empathy, are prone to risk taking to the point where they will harm self and others, and may even lack the brain structures that make empathy possible. Clearly no amount of management training is going to fix that.
Narcissists are abusers because they live in a state of constant severe unconscious anxiety, trying to shore up a very brittle and fragile ego with fantasies of omnipotence and irresistibility. Most people are narcissistic some of the time, but pathological narcissists are narcissistic to the point that they cannot have normal human relationships, ever. Again - you're not going to fix someone like that with a training course, because it's more of a embedded psychological and emotional disability. Even therapists don't rate the chances of improvement very highly after extended sessions - so a week or two certainly won't be enough.
None of this has any connection to being anxious about something, like a deadline, or a date, or an exam. Or with panic attacks. Or with being an overtly anxious person who may be prone to worry. That's a different syndrome and isn't noticeably linked to abusive behaviour.
Instead, these are classed as personality disorders - so not quite mental illness, but also not quite sanity.
There are no psychotic delusions, and no loss of lucidity. But there are severe emotional distortions and disabilities which can be contagious in that they promote harm of self and others. They're also just plain unpleasant and toxic to be around.
Trying to decide if someone with one of these conditions is actually responsible for their own actions is as much of a philosophical problem as a moral one. But it's absolutely clear that people with Dark Triad issues are almost invariably poisonous in organisations and will create extremely unpleasant and toxic experiences in a work environment.
> None of this has any connection to being anxious about something, like a deadline, or a date, or an exam. Or with panic attacks. Or with being an overtly anxious person who may be prone to worry. That's a different syndrome and isn't noticeably linked to abusive behaviour.
You lost me here a bit, but I agree with the rest. It depends what you judge to be "abusive". People definitely suffer extreme, inappropriate worry about things that make sense to worry about. They also have general feelings of worry that cause distress.
These stresses sometimes manifest in testiness. Depending on the relationship or how well liked the person is, this tends to get judged as normal tension or "abuse". I've definitely been abused by people who were clearly letting themselves be wound up. I've wondered if the person has pathological problems (eg narcissism, anxiety). I don't know if I'd go so far as saying the person is not redeemable, but the behavior was definitely unacceptable and included name calling.
I think a lot of people just don't want it to be true, but it is. That doesn't mean you have to put up with the behavior, because "they have a heart of gold deep down", or anything like that. It's just wrong to say that general anxiety isn't associated with any abusive behaviors categorically (it's really one of those statements that's the exact opposite of the truth). I've seen it happen.
>Trying to decide if someone with one of these conditions is actually responsible for their own actions is as much of a philosophical problem as a moral one. But it's absolutely clear that people with Dark Triad issues are almost invariably poisonous in organisations and will create extremely unpleasant and toxic experiences in a work environment.
I love this explanation so much, thank you. People tend to want to forgive their fellow human being when they realize their odd behavior is connected to just them being a little awkward and anxious or nervous, and that's great all of the time; everyone is constantly experiences both sides of this.
But when you're HR and you see abuse at your organization, you gotta realize there's a difference between having empathy and straight up rescue fantasies. Sociopaths are rare so you're rarely going to deal with them but they're easy to spot and fire when they cause workplace trouble. But people with narcissistic tendencies can and do hide behind HR's rescue fantasies to be enabled to play out their fucked up world view on their workers, and that's why we have so many psychology studies out here telling us to, yeah, just fire workplace abusers when it happens.
Ok. I believe if you abuse your workers, you are unhealthy, you cannot be healed easily by HR, and I will fire you/not work for you (this paper is evidence of that this belief is scientific truth, but let's just say it's a belief). I believe if you avoid abusive people in life and at work you will live a happier life. I guess I will have to make a religion out of avoiding abusive people so I can't be criticized for it?
> You're pathologizing shitty behavior when the truth is that some people do bad things for reasons that have nothing to do with mental illness.
You should be able to pathologize people without it taking away their personal responsibility.
Otherwise nobody would have responsibility in a deterministic world.
You mean narcissistic? Anxiety gives people panic attacks when they see a water glass too close to the edge of a table, I think you're talking about grandiose narcissism. It fits your description of "crippling shame and fear, combined with grandiosity."
Anxiety can cause many behaviors. Not everyone reacts the same when they’re freaking out. I don’t think it necessarily manifests in singular intense “events”.
People can be generally be on edge and scared all day. This can cause relationship problems. Some men have trouble expressing emotions beyond anger.
I've never seen these studies claiming anxious people tend to be immoral in their behaviors at work. Do you have a link? My personal intuition is that "grandiose" and "anxious" people are quite distinct groups with very distinct behaviors.
>anxious people tend to be immoral in their behaviors at work
I'm not claiming that
>My personal intuition is that "grandiose" and "anxious" people are quite distinct groups with very distinct behaviors
This is correct. But I was trying to refer to the link between grandiosity and depression when anxiety is the underlying cause (which I really didn't need to bring up in the original comment, don't know why I wrote that). I mainly had this book in mind when I was typing my comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)#Th... which was I guess the first book to link grandiosity and depression if you want to look into that.
There's probably an overlap, i.e. your dickhead boss probably has a bunch of reasons being immoral is the greater good, lesser evil, or ends justifies the means.
Of course, some people seem to just be dicks with nary a care in the world, but in my experience, most openly anxious folks are nice. They tend to be too anxious not to be.
Personally, I guess I'm an anxious person _sometimes_ ( can panic attack but tend to forget about it if I don't think about it ) and it doesn't make me act dishonest or an asshole. Not even saying I've never been an asshole, but stabbing someone in the back just isn't my style and goes against my working class Scottish stoic upbringing. As does being openly anxious, it's not something I tell folks.
So fire people with mental illness, once it’s “discovered”? You say that like it’s some monstrous character fault.
Conflict in the workplace happens, including things that crop up due to people’s neuroses. You’d have to fire most people.
I agree you should distance from anyone that appears dishonest or abusive, but that has nothing to do with mental illness. People that just do it to get what they want are if anything worse.
I have edited the comment to be sure no one interprets it as I am attacking them. The point is to fire narcissistic-type workplace abusers because their personality and behavior is resilient to change as this study, and nearly all studies, show. The workplace will be much better.
> anxious/grandiose people will never change inside (without years-long therapy)... I'm not talking about anxiety like a normal person normally experiences (you)
But writing comments on the Internet is these people's therapy.
"First, we provide insights regarding how supervisors respond to their own abusive behaviors, which allows organizations to better address its consequences. By exploring how abusive behavior impacts the supervisor him/herself, we help to identify potential “blind spots” in how abuse can promote (or inhibit) other behaviors. Specifically, we find that symbolized moral identity is a key characteristic that prompts abusive episodes to impact image concerns and subsequent impression management behaviors. Thus, organizations might consider offering ethics trainings to help supervisors monitor their symbolized moral identity when it comes to mistreating subordinates. Such trainings have been shown to impact individuals’ other forms of moral perceptions (Reynolds, 2008). Similarly, other scholars have advocated for employees to develop their self-monitoring and political skills being that they are critical when it comes to favorable impression management tactics (Bolino et al., 2016), suggesting a valuable focus on symbolized moral identity. In this way, these trainings may help supervisors become more aware of the impacts of their behavior for their image which, as indicated by our findings, may lead to some degree of reparatory behavior – albeit inauthentic reparatory behaviors.
Second, our findings have implications for the selection of organizational supervisors. That is, organizations that place greater emphasis on authenticity regarding leadership or organizational climate (George et al., 2007) would benefit from our findings, particularly when it comes to supervisor selection. Specifically, we find that supervisors who endorse less of a symbolized moral identity are less likely to have image concerns and thus less prone to engage in impression management tactics that may be perceived as inauthentic following abusive episodes (Eastman, 1994). Thus, it behooves organizations that want to develop highly authentic supervisors or organizational climates to seek to hire supervisors that are lower (or at least not higher) on symbolized moral identity.
Third, prior research indicates that engaging in daily impression management tactics comes with a personal cost to the actor. Specifically, impression management tactics have been linked to greater subsequent daily cognitive depletion, exhaustion, anxiety, work-family conflict, and sleep (Klotz et al., 2018; Wagner et al., 2014), while potentially being deceptive to the supervisor themselves (Conger, 1990). Supervisors who engage in abusive episodes not only experience greater daily image concerns, but in attempting to resolve those concerns with daily impression management tactics, are likely to generate greater personal exhaustion, anxiety, and work-to-family hardships (Wagner et al., 2014). While it would be most beneficial for organizations to integrate training initiatives that aid supervisors to develop better interpersonal and leadership skills as a means of curtailing abusive episodes in the first place (Tepper, 2000), it would also be advantageous for organizations to provide support for leaders that have engaged in abusive episodes to more effectively cope with the image concerns they experience as a result of mistreating their employees. Further, providing training to supervisors on the implications of their behavior—moral or image— may prove to be a fruitful path forward for practitioners. Recent research has highlighted the value of self-reflection for supervisors (Lanaj et al., 2019) as a means of fostering improved behaviors; encouraging such reflection may help supervisors to more genuinely respond to their past behavior, rather than engage in surface-level, image-focused behaviors.
Finally, Eastman (1994) indicates that impression management tactics are received unfavorably when perceived as insincere or there are ulterior motives for the behaviors (see also Harris et al., 2007; Leary, 1996). Our study shows that prior-day abusive episodes precede next-day ingratiation, exemplification, and self-promotion behaviors. Given the temporal proximity of abusive and impression management behaviors, third-parties (e.g., subordinates, the focal supervisor’s direct supervisor) may view next-day impression management behaviors as insincere or owing to ulterior motives of the supervisor trying to repair his/her damaged image as a result of his/her prior day abusive behaviors. Indeed, our emphasis on within-person variation on such impression management behaviors underscores this point; within-person variation on impression management behaviors, by deviating from the supervisor’s typical impression management behaviors, may warrant additional attributions of insincerity. This lack of attributed sincerity can undermine the effectiveness of the impression management tactics (Eastman, 1994; Leary, 1996) or erode the supervisor’s relationships with others (Kim et al., 2018). Thus, supervisors who engage in any form of abusive episodes would benefit by being cognizant that their impression management approaches intended to repair their image concerns may be interpersonally costly. In other words, impression management behaviors should be employed with caution given the potential downsides of those behaviors (Bolino et al., 2016). Instead, managers may find value in employing more genuine forms of reparative behaviors, rather than impression management behaviors, following episodes of abusive behavior."
I haven’t heard these terms before and I am paywalled from the actual study, but my first reaction is to view them with suspicion since the level of academic rigor in these fields seems very low in general. And yes they do end up having an impact on all of society when their conclusions are popularized and amplified by activists ultimately. So the caution is warranted.
Why is this upvoted, is HN literally a slot machine?
It's garbage.
A 3 weeks, self evaluated survey for amazon vouchers for ~100 people? It's a great student thesis, but it's not science.
The journal article reads like it's actually written to be confusing. Why do we think that's acceptable?
What is the game here, people don't like supervisors so you write an article that make them look bad, so the media creates spam around you, they get clicks from the masses and you make money while everyone gets dumber.
Out of interest does anyone have a link to the actual questionnaire used? So we can actually evaluate the claim.
It looks like the survey surveyed 100 supervisors; that would be more difficult to do independently than just surveying 100 rank-and-file employees. (The alternative would be to run this inside a FANG or similarly large company, and then try to get permission through the formal process to get a paper or book published.)
And Timnit Gebru would be the evil supervisor I assume?
Timnit Gebru is a bad person, but this article is a strange segway.
"Moral cleansing" is a made up term with no meaning for instance. It's used to confuse people, these industries have evolved similarly to how GPT-3 has evolved. You short circuit peoples brains so they can't evaluate what's being said.
1) A person-turned-abuser sees an opportunity to abuse an undeserving bystander.
2) The abuser takes it, using polite-sounding, civil language as a smokescreen.
3) Some commenters will point out the malice in the abuser's tone.
4) The abuser furiously spams the thread, claiming clear & good intentions. The abuser may even pretend to apologize to the abused.
5) Months later, the abuser only remembers "both sides were wrong" or the abused "kind of deserved it"
The relevant quote is "Propriety is the least of all laws, but the most obeyed." If a person offends the group's vague sense of manners, that person risks being condemned and ostracized. But if a person can cloak their action under a thin veneer of respectability (propriety), they can do quite a bit, even harm a fellow human being, without being detected.