The end of etiquette

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Trusted by more than 60% of the AMLA 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey AI tailored for law. Learn more at Harvey.ai Okay, this morning I was trying to get to work and racing for the train. I'm about to swipe my card so that I can step through when this woman blatantly pushes ahead of me in line. We end up both getting to the train just in time, but I'm like, are you really so much more important than the rest of us that the rules don't apply to you? When we're children, we learn how to stand in line that you wait for your turn at the water fountain. You wait for your turn to grab a pencil. You wait for your turn to tap your card so that you can get on the metro. She did not wait her turn. I'm not the only person who's irritated by this kind of thing. Almost a half of Americans say that they've noticed people have gotten ruder in the wake of the COVID pandemic. It's like, people don't know how to act anymore. This week I'm riding for basic manners. I'm curious, where did the days go where people were kind? No, excuse me, no part of me, no, hey man, can I get by you? You just have to walk past somebody and I don't even acknowledge them. Everybody's got no manners. I'm Junklin Hill. This is Explanation to Me from Vox. And today, we're going to learn some manners. Manners, of course, are a really good thing because they encourage us to think about others and to behave in ways that are not anti-social and potentially even dangerous. Kirstie Sedgman is a professor at the University of Bristol, and she wrote the book on being unreasonable, breaking the rules and making things better. For me, it boils down to, was it a rule that was built for a particular time that is now obsolete? Who was it built to benefit in the first place? And how can we have these conversations so that we figure out what we want, what we all want social life and public space to be like in a way that benefits everybody and doesn't accidentally exclude? It's not inherently elitist at all to ask people to adhere to what we call the social contract, which is that system of rules and norms that encourage pro-social behaviour and discourage deviants. And in fact, when I started researching on being unreasonable, I found out that the social contract is the only reason that we were able to form societies and civilisations at all. And it's really common to say that the reason that we're able to form these societies is because we developed the ability to use tools, but actually just as fundamental was the ability to develop these contracts that would encourage us to trust strangers rather than to see them as a threat. Oh, I think that's so interesting because this idea of a social contract, you know, this responsibility we have for others, putting your trust in others, being dependable for others. How is that holding up these days, are we still abiding by our social contract? That's what troubles me. So as far back as the ancient Greeks, people like Plato were complaining about people who used to be respectful and quiet and care about their elders, or at least able, he said to be controlled with a stick if they became deviants. I've suddenly found their tongues and were talking back to the people in power in a way that he felt to be completely disrespectful. Sound of mindedness is doing everything in an orderly manner and quietly, in walking on the streets, in conversation, and doing everything else in a similar fashion. So to some extent, we've been thinking that the social contract is on the verge of collapsing for over 2,000 years now, but it is uncontrovertible that we are now in an age where we are being encouraged and indeed deliberately incentivised to think in individualistic rather than in communitarian ways. So to ask ourselves, not what is best for us as a society, but what is best for me as an individual. One of the places where I see people thinking like individuals is on public transportation. Why are people acting out there? I think one of the problems is that we're being increasingly crammed into tightly contained spaces, but what we have been seeing increasingly is people breaking rules and when you see other people not moderating their behaviour for the good of everybody, but instead doing the things that are right for them that they want to do, it can start to seem a bit like a mugs game. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? Yeah, and I feel like you see that a lot on airplanes. I saw a lady walk down the aisle on the airplane, barefoot, go use the restroom, barefoot. That's insane. We've got to do better. We should get rid of the reclining button on airplane seats. 100% agree. That's amazing. Either give us more room or take the button away. Are there any rules we can agree on there? There's a really easy answer, I think, to that question of should we or should we not recline our seats on an airplane? So I call it the reasonable tango, because on the one hand, you have one person going of course it's reasonable to recline seats. They are made to recline how I'll see you meant to go to a good night's sleep and on the other hand you say, but what about people with long legs who will be made physically uncomfortable if you're and we go round and round like that, should we or should we not? But for me it's not so much about yes or no, but how, if we want to recline our seat, how might we go about it? So I try to make a point of turning to the person behind me and say, "Do you mind if I recline my seat now?" And if they say, "No, that I'm in a bit of an uncomfortable position because if the person behind me has already reclined their seat, then I've got a much narrower gap." But so far, not a single person that I've ever asked has said no, but what you can do is just prepare people, get them to move their legs out of the way and particularly if they've got a drink resting on it, making sure that you don't just wall up that over their legs and give them a very damp flight. For me it's less about, should we do this yes or no, but how do we work at the acceptable boundaries of behaviour and how can we have these conversations when we are being encouraged to yell at each other across a divide rather than to listen to each other and engage in what the American philosopher general's called public reason, which is where you say, "Well, this is what seems reasonable to me and this is why, based on my position, for what seems reasonable to you." What about that calculus of someone say it's rush hour, people are on the train, someone has their bag in the seat and other people can't sit down right there? That's one of my pet peeves. Same. And I was just on a train, so I rushed back here from London where I was giving a talk, but that's not to say that I never accidentally leave my seat, my bag on a seat. In fact, I found myself doing it just now because I was getting all my stuff out, I was plugging in my laptop and I was doing some work and then I looked up and I realised that there were people filtering down the aisle, giving me the side eye and I'd left my bag there. But that's where actually part of the social contract is literally about how we perform compliance. So what I did then was snatch it up and perform a mayor culper and I'm really sorry. And actually that's a really important part of what it means to be part of the community. Sometimes you might inadvertently break the rules, but showing that your repentant is really important. It can be really hard to follow the rules when they keep changing. Case in point, our phones. That's next. Support for the show comes from upside, which immediately reminds me of when school teachers would smack me upside the head. But let's see what upside is. 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As an Emily Post, the socialite who literally wrote the book on the subject, etiquette in society in business and politics and at home was published back in the 1920s. More than a century later, her family is still in the business of teaching us how to mind our manners. My name is Lizzy Post and I am an author and a co-president and podcast host at the Emily Post Institute. Does that come with a certain amount of pressure, though? Because I imagine people may hear that and think, "Okay, so you're on top of it. You must be polite at all times." I did a lot of therapy for a lot of years, yes. Lizzy says etiquette doesn't have to be intimidating or elitist and that it changes with the times. In Emily's, my great-great-grandmother's previous works from her era, 1922, when she was actually writing, she wrote from 1922 to 1960 for the brand. She was really interesting because while she talked about the standards of the day, she also allowed those standards to change, I mean, think about 1922 to 1960. Big differences, huge swings in how people behaved, you know, shaperones by her second edition were gone from the book. You know, it was life was changing and evolving and she changed and evolved with it. etiquette is not a rigid code of manners. It is simply how persons lives touch one another. And I think that it can very easily have these connotations of being something that is about a secret society almost or it's only about formality or it's only for people who are very wealthy and that can have a really exclusive feel that's kind of nasty. It can also start to feel a lot like judgment. I know something you don't know. I think one of the reasons etiquette can feel so out of sorts, particularly right now is because times are changing and they're just changing really quickly. I think phone etiquette is really, really emblematic of that. Like people playing music or having their phone on speaker, no headphones. Do we just not know how to act when it comes to our phones like, are there not rules and regulations? Is this a Wild West? What is going on? There are definitely rules of courtesy and blaring anything out of your phone, whether it's a phone call, it's a FaceTime call, or it's your TikTok feed or that movie that you're watching is all inappropriate when other people are the captive audience and haven't asked to be. It's just this mindful moment where people forget where they are. They're so used to being in their own world with their phone six inches from their face that they forget that anyone can even hear what it is that they are doing on their phone at that particular moment, really hard to correct this behavior because generally, we don't correct other people's behaviors. Yeah, and I want to get into that part. Yeah, I mean, I admit, especially in public spaces, I am team mind my business. I'm like telling my business, but at what point do you say, like, hey, I feel like it's a really tough judgment call and it's going to be different for every situation. But for me, and just so you'll know, the speaker phone in public is like my greatest pet peeve. Like, this is nails on a chalkboard to me when it happens. I get a rate. A lot of listeners feel the same way. Like people taking a phone call on speaker phone in front of a bunch of other people who can overhear it and every time like everyone's not distracted by the fact that you're having a personal phone call, please stop using your phone with the sound on in the middle of a public place. I thought we all agreed upon this a long time ago, apparently COVID has changed that. So when do you step in? I think that when I am in a space that I'm only going to occupy for a short time, I am telling myself, mind my own business, don't worry about it. When it's that, that train ride that we're starting, we're not just getting off at the next stop. I'm going to be on this for a while and apparently this person is to or that four hour flight that you're on. Now I think we start to have a bit more standing to say something and to ask. And I think one of the ways that you can ask is to say, hey, could you put some headphones on while you're enjoying that or watching that or on your call? I say could you because they might not have headphones with them. But even if they don't, it's a reminder, it's kind of like that little bit of a check of awareness that, oh, this thing I'm doing is impacting people around me. Here's the rub, you can't control other people's behavior. So you cannot control if this person is going to get defensive even at the sweetest ask from the sweetest looking person on earth. You have to do a little bit if you're going to ask the question, be prepared for rudeness and return. And I hate saying that to any audience, but it is the reality. We can't control other people's behavior. Okay, there's clearly a wrong way to use speaker phones and FaceTime. What's the right way to use them? Because we do a lot of talking on our speaker phones, even in our own homes, and you might be moving from one room to another, passing through the living room where people are watching TV or you're in the kitchen and all of a sudden a roommate has come into the kitchen while you're on a call that's on speaker phone. You really want to let the person on the other end of the phone know that there's other people present now. My cousin is so good about this. He always tells his daughter when she gets into the car, "Hey, Aunt Lizzie is on the phone. Say hi to her or something." And then we both know, I know to watch my language, there's now a child present. She knows to not ask her dad too many questions or knows to say hi to her auntie. So much nicer than all of a sudden having a voice pop up and realizing, "Oh my gosh, I was just telling a really personal story and I didn't realize there was a bigger audience for it." What about having your phone on the table, say if you're at dinner or off the table? Because that also gets real people very passionately about that one. I am so bad about this one. I often have my face down on the table. The funny thing is I'm not even looking or expecting, like I don't have kids, like I don't have a partner, I'm not looking for someone to call like with an interruption, but it's not good etiquette. It is really best to have that phone put away to make sure that it's on silent and it's not going to interrupt your time together. But to have it there, especially face up where any message that comes in is now going to catch the attention of everyone at the table, that's an unnecessary distraction for sure. There's a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for and the more that you can remind yourself of that and start using the tools available to you. Even if that tool is putting the phone away like in your pocket, it is important to exercise those and remember that we have them because otherwise we do get to the point where we use our phones so regularly that we will use them rudely without meaning to. Is there an obligation when when you need to text someone back, like does it have to be within a certain time? I know people with inboxes of text message and they pile up like you go about your day and the next thing you know you look at your phone and you have 80 unread texts and it's like, oh no, what do I do? My friends will all be mad at me. Right. I wish. I wish there was, but I do feel like it really depends on the text itself. The one I don't think you should wait on is when friends or potential romantic partners offer a time to get together. That's one that I feel like you should really respond to invitations as soon as possible. Don't let that sit. If there's a reason why you're letting it sit, talk to someone about that, say, oh, I've got to, I've got to check with my partner about that. I know we had talked about doing something else Saturday at that time. You know, give them some kind of an understanding because it's a really beautiful thing to be invited to go spend time with someone. And I think we want to treasure that a little more than we do in today's age. You know where we spend a lot of time with other people? Work. That's coming up. Support for ExplanationMe comes from Grenola. Nobody likes having meetings about meetings. What we need is a tool designed to make the first meeting so productive that the follow-up never even has to happen. Enter Grenola. Grenola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. Here's how it works. You take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Grenola securely transcribes the meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. There's no cumbersome setup either. Grenola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. It's just your normal meeting with superpowers. So now you actually get to listen instead of trying to catch every important word. You still walk away knowing exactly what was decided, who's doing what, and what comes next. If your meetings are eating up your day, Grenola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free. Just head to granola.ai/explainit. That's granola.ai/explainit to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai/explainit. Luckily, there are sonos. Sonos is ultra-headphones connect to your system so you can listen when and how you want. Every sonos product sinks and can be controlled from your phone, so whatever you're listening to can follow you room to room, moment to moment. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system. I'm JQ. Back with more. Explain it to me. And I'm here with Tessa West. She's a professor of psychology at NYU, an author of the book, Jerks at Work, Toxic Co-Workers, and what to do about them. OK, Tessa, I see a lot of memes and tweets online about Gen Z in the workplace. You know, they're bringing ice coffee to interviews. They're making questionable fashion choices. They're hitting the Gen Z stair. And I haven't been getting so annoyed with the fact that I give instructions or I ask their opinions about something. Or I say something and they just, like, I'm like, hello, I'm talking to you. Don't bring an ice latte to a job interview. Get the coffee after. How long could the interview be? But a lot of younger workers are firing back and essentially saying, your rules are unfair. It gets heated. We all have collectively agreed that, like, we know we can't get fired for saying nothing, but we could get fired if we actively say the thing that we're thinking. We're stupid and we just can't say that because we're at our job. So that's why we're staring at you. Who is right here? Who is wrong here? No one's right. No one's wrong. I think we all are a bit to blame here. I think older generations have very strict rules. I think they've come into the workplace with tight cultures and they like their hierarchies. They like people being respectful in the workplace and by that I mean you wear certain clothes. You show up at a certain time and you write emails with proper punctuation and I think younger generations fight all of that a bit silly. I think they use written communication and a way to just get stuff done. And so we end up in these intractable conflicts in the workplace where older generations are really angry and feel disrespected all the time and younger generations are pushing back and saying, just chill out. We can get the work done without all of that additional stuff layered on top of it. And I think that we are just constantly fighting with each other over being two minutes late to work, wearing the wrong pants and bringing iced coffee into the workplace or open-toed shoes. I've heard it all. Wait, not coming for my open-toed shoes. Green nail polish. I see Eos have been complaining to me about nail polish colors and you just all the things that someone can do wrong. From an older generation person's perspective, Gen Z has somehow done. Why do people need to know when they're forgetting manners at work? What importance does that have for them? I think people don't realize how much self-harm they're doing when they are low-level energy vampires, noise polluters, all of that type of stuff at work. He is going to want to promote you even if you're good at your job or be around you or invite you to the networking event. All that stuff you need to get ahead if you don't have these things. And I think that when we're annoying to be around, even if we're good at our job, those kinds of workplace creature conference are always going to take precedence over the quality of your work because there's always someone who can do the job. I think for people who are more seasoned and even for those who aren't, it's easy to get angry and frustrated when someone's manners aren't up to par at work. How do you take that anger and maybe teach someone like, "Hey, this is what you do in an office. How do you make that emotion productive?" Yes, I think this is hard because all we want to do is just like yell at the person. I think this is where making super explicit workplace norms, like a list, just very out there for everybody is important and for people coming in and people who are already there. Here's a list of the things that are okay to do at work and that includes personal hygiene behaviors, what you can be loud about, where you can have meetings. All of that stuff isn't an explicit document somewhere so that when someone violates the norm, they know they have violated the norm. I think our tendency is to want to go shame the person or tell them don't do it again but I actually think like documented stuff is better because someone else is going to come along and do something else in the lane and you might as well just get it over with and write all the things down now. Even things that you think you would never have to write down, like please don't walk around barefoot. I've had to create that in my lab manual at NYU, please don't be barefoot in the bathroom. Please wear a shirt, don't bepe in my lab, that's also on there. Oh my god. I have like a twin, like actual equipment and I'm like do not fame. Okay, well they they've gone through high school and they go to college and they thought they could vape inside so I just literally had to end these are responsible smart people, super explicit norms that I thought, oh right, I guess we just humanity is not at its peak levels of, you know, sophistication right now. Okay, then what do you think needs to happen between younger people, older people, more experience, less experience, just in general, what do we need to do to build a better workplace where You know, there's respect on all sides. We're letting go of the unnecessary things. We're keeping what we need in line. What do you think it's going to have to take to build that kind of workplace and workforce? - Yeah, this is the million dollar question. The first thing we need to do is stop communicating asynchronously, so texting, Slack, email. At any time there's conflict or anytime things are getting weird, you have to have a conversation live with that person. And conflict is not bad, conflict is good, when done well. If you address the behavior itself, not your feelings about the behavior, the specific action. I think we've all been trained to talk about our feelings. You made me feel disrespected. You don't trust me. No, put all that aside, talk about the thing they did. We tend to, in our heads, form all kinds of reasons why people are jerks at work, but normally they don't realize it. And so we just have to focus on the specific behaviors. Do it fast, do it early, do it often, and do it in person or on the phone. That's the best way to get people to sort of get that muscle back and to have a better workplace across people who are used to different norms. And that's our show. We're working on an episode about pets. And we want to hear from your pet. That's right. Your dog, your cat, your iguana. Introduce us to them and have them say hello. Or if your pet is no longer with us, give us a quick snapshot of who they were and why you left them. You and your furry friend can give us a call at 1-800-618-8545. Or you can email [email protected]. You want to know one thing that's super polite? Becoming a vox member. Vox members get to listen to the show, add free, and get a ton of other cool perks. To learn more, head over to vox.com/members. This episode was produced by Ariana Sputu. It was edited by Ginny Lotton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Bridger Dunnigan, our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and I'm your host, John Kalenhill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. (upbeat music) Life is too short for bad audio quality. Sonos Ace Ultra Headphones connect to your system so you can listen when and how you want. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system. 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