The importance of being polite
Friday, Nov. 25, 2011 - 11:30 p.m.
Editor:
Have you ever had to interact with someone and found it really hard to get along? Do you feel uncomfortable around someone because they have been rude, or do you feel like someone is keeping something from you? Everyone deals with these problems, and I would like to explain why these acts of incivility occur in today's society.
Politeness plays an important role in getting along with people. We are more polite with some people than we are with others. According to Stephen and Liberman, there is a connection between social distance and politeness. People are more polite with strangers than they are with people they know. This is because a stranger isn't familiar with your personality, so if you address a stranger impolitely, you could turn that person away and give them an unfavorable impression.
Often a good first impression is key, and it really does affect how polite people will be to you. By using politeness, the speaker is creating a distance between themselves and the other person. Sharing some information with strangers without disclosing an overwhelming amount of details is considered to be polite.
Sociologist Georg Simmel explains this type of relationship with his theory on distance and the stranger. Simmel says that a stranger is one who is neither too close nor too far. Every relationship, even an intimate one, can have a degree of strangeness. We determine value in relationships by the distance those individuals are from us. We look for relationships that we think will be beneficial, but they will not be important to us if we don't have to work hard to keep them.