This past weekend while at Johns Hopkins for alumni council meetings I heard a lecture by highly esteemed Professor and Author, Dr. P.M. Forni. Dr. Forni studies and assesses the significance of civility, manners and politeness in contemporary society. I find Dr. Forni’s work fascinating. [The photo above is pat of a campaign adopted in Howard County, MD based on the principles of Dr. Forni's first book].
The Professor started with a story. Each fall, with his new crop of students, Dr. Forni holds a lunch where he asks one student to “pass him the salt.” Inevitably the student does just that: they pass him the salt.
Dr. Forni than asks the others what that student did wrong?
The correct answer is that you never pass only the salt – you also pass the pepper. Now to those of us familiar with Emily Post, this seems obvious. But what’s interesting is that the underlying logic of the rule is not at all about etiquette or conventions; it’s actually about ethics and compassion.
Thinking ahead to realize that the person may want to use both the salt and pepper is a subconscious effort to put anothers’ needs ahead of our own. Passing both the salt and pepper is also done so that others who later want the salt and pepper need not chase two separate items around the table.
So what? Maybe etiquette isn’t totally arbitrary, but how does it really help you? Well, Dr. Forni’s findings strongly suggest that the people who are most successful in life are those who excel in social skills and “civility,” as opposed to say, IQ-level. In fact over time at a job, all else being equal, a person with superior social skills will ultimately progress further and faster than a person with higher IQ but less civility.
The good news is this: being a jerk is a choice we make and can change, IQ is not.
Also interesting was Dr. Forni’s observation that two circumstances contribute more than any other to the disintegration of civility: a) stress and b) anonymity. I thought this interesting as the web is certainly an environment where stress and anonymity run high and often in tandem. Blog comments and reviews are a great example of online environments where people are free to act like asses with no moral consequence.
Just something to ponder.
——You can order Dr. Forni’s first book here.
Want to See Something Cool? Check out this visual IQ test made by students at Yale University.
