Wisconsin comedian Charlie Berens has a great routine on 4-way stops in the Midwest. Midwestern drivers are so nice and obsequious that they will constantly wave at the other guy at the stop sign, even if they were there first and had the right of way. Like any good comedy, it’s funny because it’s at least a little true. As a resident of a small Midwestern town, I can vouch for the authenticity of the joke. Over the past month, I’ve had three separate stop sign incidents in the Midwest in which the other driver, having the right of way, attempted to yield and wave me out of their turn. Now, I’m a proud Midwesterner, but maybe I’m just not that nice, or maybe something really bothers me about people who don’t play by the rules. When this happens to me, I like to point at the stop sign, trying to let the other driver know that there is an established set of rules and that, having successfully completed driver training, I expect you to follow them. In fact, once, I rolled down the window and shouted “I have a stop sign!” and insisted that the other driver continue (she didn’t even have a stop sign in this case – it’s worse than Berens thinks!)
The last time this happened, I was so agitated that I had to pause and think about why this form of rule-breaking bothers me so much. After all, the other person is just trying to be nice – “Midwest nice”. Doesn’t that give a good impression to people in my part of the country? However, I had an epiphany in the car: I realized that this attempt at “niceness” was actually irritating because it disrupted my strongly based expectations of what should happen based on a set of very clear and well-known rules. I felt like Walter Sobchak The Big Lebowski: “Am I the only one here giving a (expletive) about periods?!” (Don’t worry, I didn’t come close to threatening the other driver). Simply put, the other driver’s action, while well-intentioned, did not have a positive outcome. It was irritating, it led to confusion and delays which, although minor, were no less irritating. Rules are meant to be followed, not arbitrarily tossed aside on a whim for the benefit of an outsider. We could have a good faith debate about whether a particular rule is fair and appropriate, but in cases where the rules are demonstrably fair and designed to generate smooth social interactions between strangers (like stop signs) , not following the rules is antisocial behavior. act.
Then a more important revelation struck me: We live in an age of excessive “niceness,” and attempts by well-meaning people to simply be nice increasingly lead to rule violations and societal decadence. The stop sign problem is emblematic of a larger problem. It’s true that those who yield at stop signs are generally harmless, so maybe I should calm down about that. But in other cases, when people choose not to follow the rules in an effort to be nice, the consequences can be more than just annoying, they can even be downright dangerous.
Examples of excessive kindness are all around us and range from the mundane and slightly annoying to the potentially deadly. Here’s a brief list, I’m sure you can think of it yourself:
- parents want to be kind to their children, so they avoid harsh discipline and their children become unruly children
- teachers try to be kind to students so as not to give bad grades or critical comments
- efforts to “end the stigma” associated with bad behaviors like addiction to drugs, alcohol or pornography, because the stigmatization of people (literally, marking them with shame) is perceived as mean
- giving up the “rules” of family life, such as expecting parents to marry and fully commit to raising their children, because this is judgmental
- suspend meritocracy to help the “disadvantaged” access better jobs or careers
The latter example is most worrying and appears in DEI-inspired programs that water down or eliminate skill requirements in an effort to increase the representation of disadvantaged groups. Many right-wing commentators are alarmed by the airline industry’s efforts to “diversify” its pilot corps. If the relaxation of skill standards happens, and there is ample evidence to support these stories, we could face deadly consequences when undertrained and underqualified “diverse hires” make fatal mistakes to controls of an airliner.
So yes, maybe we should rethink “kindness”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against kindness, I’m just against taking a good thing too far. In statistics, there is a categorization of errors that can be useful in explaining the “too good” problem. A type I error is a false positive which consists of establishing a causal effect when it is not true, for example by attributing effectiveness to a drug when in reality it had none, and that the The results of the clinical trials were just a matter of chance. A type II error is a false negative: it involves finding that the drug was not effective when it actually is, but perhaps the clinical trial was not properly calibrated to capture its true impact.
Being unnecessarily mean – acting like a jerk – is a Type I error. You lash out at your wife or children for a harmless mistake. The bad attitude and angry outburst is not justified, you should not have ruled in favor of your anger. This problem is usually easy to spot, and corrective action is rarely controversial: no one likes a fool, and we all know one when we see one. Being too nice, however, is tricky: it’s a Type II error. You have the right to yell, or maybe just use harsh language, because the other person behaved badly and deserved social sanction. But most of us don’t like confrontation, and it’s often easier to just put on a pretty face, not call out the other person’s bad behavior, and just walk away. This is the path of least resistance. I admit I’m guilty – I’m not confrontational and I’ve probably let too many bad things slide.
So what can we do about the epidemic of excessive kindness? I’m thinking about setting up optimal anger seminars: “Hi, my name is Tyler and my love language is tough love. Don’t you like it? Move on!” All joking aside, it’s tricky. There are no easy answers, and as the greatest living economist, Thomas Sowell, so eloquently stated: “There are no solutions, only compromises.” All I can ask as an economist is that people recognize the problem: it’s just as possible to be too nice as it is to be too mean. Martin Luther, you can fall on both sides of the horse. It can be bad not to be kind; It can be bad to be too nice. The trick is to find an optimal one, to balance the trade-offs between the problems. Too naughty (Type I error) is usually obvious, so the key is to critically evaluate all of our actions and strive to recognize when we might be slipping into the “too nice” Type II error. Severity has its place. If insisting on following the rules makes me look jerky to my Midwestern cohorts, so be it. If this is the price to pay for living in a world where rules benefit everyone, I am willing to pay it.
Tyler Watts is a professor of economics and management at Ferris State University.
