We think of niceness as our due, what we all owe each other, an inalienable human right, but actually we pay a big personal cost for the niceness we insist others show us. Every time we discourage people from sharing their disappointing or critical opinions with us, we are asking them to humor us, to keep us in the dark.
This is sensitivity’s hidden cost: The more sensitive you are, the more people will walk on eggshells around you and the less you’ll know about where you really stand with them. Sensitivity invites a news blackout you may not be able to afford.
Niceness is not like air, some basic human entitlement that’s available cheaply everywhere. Niceness costs us. Of course it takes real effort to be nice, to bite one’s tongue and choose one’s words carefully. But niceness costs on the receiving end too. Niceness is a luxury good you can buy only if you’re willing to pay the price in lost access to feedback.
Think of the wall-to-wall niceness that rich and powerful bosses demand of their servants. They think they can afford to pay the price for their servants’ supplicating silence. After all, so what if the servants keep their honest opinions to themselves? The bosses don’t care about losing access to their feedback. And if the servants get so frustrated they quit, the boss can just hire replacements.
Still even the bosses pay more than servant salaries for the niceness they demand. If you insist that the people around you bite their tongues, they may well find ways to backbite instead, pantry servants secretly spitting in the food, servants spreading rumors, stealing or secretly plotting insurrections.
Powerful bosses can try to prevent these costs too. They can hire food-tasters to keep them from getting poisoned by frustrated servants. But then the food-tasters can poison the boss too. Even at the highest levels, demanding niceness will cost you something in security, loyalty and orienting feedback about how people really see you.
I think we blind ourselves to the Price of Nice with a few comforting but bogus folk theories about the relationship between niceness and feedback. Here’s a sampling:
Bogus Principle #1: There’s A Nice Way to Share Any Feedback: There’s no trade-off, no price to niceness since there’s always a nice way to give any feedback, however critical. It’s all in how you word it, or your tone or your intention.
We hear this assumption in how people sometimes couch their insistence on niceness. They say, “When I tell you to be nice I’m not telling you to be quiet. By all means, say anything you think or feel. Be honest. Just convey it nicely. That’s all I ask. Always be honest; Always be nice. The two are not incompatible.”
This argument is wrong and it’s risky for the people who make it, wrong in that no matter how carefully you craft it, lots of critical feedback simply won’t feel nice to its recipient. Dangerous in that if the recipient can dismiss it, saying “I’ll take the feedback, just not that way,” you have to decide whether it’s worth trying to say it nicely by the recipient’s standards. After a few tries you’ll just give up, leaving the recipient in the disorienting dark.
Pretend that we’re open to all honest feedback so long as it’s worded nicely, and we’ll still pay the price for insisting on the niceness. We’ll still be kept in the dark.
Bogus Principle #2 What Can’t Be Said Nicely Isn’t Worth Saying: Another argument goes that while not all feedback can be stated nicely, all useful feedback can be: “There’s always a nice way to give constructive feedback, and if you can’t think of a nice way to share it, then that’s evidence that it’s not really constructive feedback. It’s just hurtful and shouldn’t be shared.”
Sounds good on paper, but again bogus and dangerous to embrace. Just another more direct way to invite a news blackout, saying, “Look if you can’t meet my feedback delivery standards, then your opinion is not worth sharing.”
Bogus Principle #3 Niceness is the right way to show respect: This one is half true. Niceness is one of two ways we show respect and the other is its opposite, giving critical feedback.
We honor people by biting our tongues, but we also humor them, showing disrespect by treating them as too weak to handle our true opinions. Conversely we humiliate people by giving them critical feedback, but we also honor them, respecting them as strong enough to consider criticism.
Bogus Principle #4 When we teach people to be nice, we’re civilizing not just their tongues but their minds. We often act as though in banishing feedback we don’t like we don’t just chase it of people’s mouths but their minds, as though commanding “Don’t say that” translates as “Don’t even think that.”
But who among us has that control over others, and who should?
We all have our cultivated intuitions. Right or wrong, they’re ours. They’re open to suggestion but we don’t allow others to simply commandeer our minds, banishing our intuitions with the command, “That’s not nice.”
This is what produces the news blackout. “That’s not nice,” doesn’t eliminate the news in other people’s opinions. It just eliminates your access to that news. People are still thinking those thoughts around you. You’re just no longer privy to them.
Niceness matters. It’s often worth its cost in lost feedback. But you put yourself at serious risk not recognizing the cost. A connoisseur’s rarified standards for niceness can make him as cultivated as a mushroom--in the dark covered with poot.
And the problem extends beyond niceness’s price. Every time we discourage people from sharing thoughts we don’t want to hear, we risk losing access to thoughts we will wish we had heard.
When insisting on nice, think twice.