March 22, 2026
One of the hardest things we can do as humans is to see ourselves from the outside. That is, to see ourselves as other see us, or as we see others, which is roughly the same thing. We literally can’t do it - our viewpoint is fixed inside our skull after all - so to the extent we try to, it’s through thought experiment. And sometimes we don’t run very realistic experiments, and sometimes we forget to run them at all. And always the experiments have systemic problems due to a number of factors, including the self-serving biases. As a result, not all people are equally well calibrated.
This is a problem, since many features of our society are built on a notion of reciprocity. We find it both in the principle of equality before the law and in the golden rule. Of course there always has been and always will be a gap between ideals and reality, but still. It is a basic principle that we are somehow equal (although we are not the same), and that our obligations are mutual.
In this blog post, I would like to highlight a particular failure of reciprocity that I call the asymmetry of politeness.
It is part of the social contract that we will be reasonably polite in our interactions. The reason is that it is more pleasant for all of us. None of us likes to interact with someone who is brash or rude. The principle of reciprocity outlines that we should all be equally polite to one another. But how can we gauge that when we can’t see ourselves from the outside? We can’t. We have to play it by ear, and some people appear to be tonedeaf.
Like trust, politeness is a kind of social glue. And just like trust can be misused by social engineers to achieve goals, so politeness can be misused in the social game. It is a space that can be both skewed and exploited.
And hence we have all encountered people who in various degrees feel free to bullshit their way through life, using cheap rhetoric, engaging in logical fallacies, treating their own conjectures and proclamations as fact, making unfounded assertions and sweeping generalizions, all with extreme confidence. They are supported in this by the general expectation of politeness, which demands of us that we suffer such things in silence. In a spectacular case of irony, it is considered rude to point out the reality of such statements or to challenge them, because it will be too embarrassing for someone to be outed as a bullshitter or a bully.
That means that someone might use the principle of politeness as a two-phased weapon in a play for dominance. First by violating it themselves, and then in invoking it if and when they should be challenged by someone pointing out their violation!
Even the notion of psychological safety can be used as a weapon by those who expect politeness to work asymmetrically in their favour, in a particularly bold move. You can’t point out that someone is bullshitting, because that might make them feel unsafe. In other words, psychological safety is used as an excuse to silence people.
This is obviously a gross abuse of psychological safety. The real point of psychological safety is to create a space that makes it safe to express your opinion without fear of retribution. It is not to create an environment devoid of critical, even uncomfortable questions, or where no-one ever asks you to provide evidence for your claims. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be weaponized to that effect.
In some cases this will be deliberate. There are sociopaths among us. But presumably a more common situation is that people simply don’t realize that they have double standards. It is hard to see ourselves from the outside, after all.
It can be difficult to deal with people who are poorly calibrated with respect to politeness, who have come to expect and even rely upon its asymmetry.
Our patterns of social interactions are deeply ingrained in us. It is hard for people to recognize and accept that their patterns are problematic and that they should work to change them. It is bound to trigger cognitive dissonance and self-defense mechanisms. But there is also little to be gained from complying with their expectations. If we do, we’re just enabling the abusive behavior and making ourselves complicit in our own exploitation. Hence the only real solution is to reduce the level of politeness with which we meet those people.
The problem of asymmetries in social relations is of course not limited to politeness. Any aspect of social relations is subject to asymmetries. And for the sociopath and the bully, the asymmetry is the point, since they see social relations as a game of domination.