Your Definition of “Politeness” Has Quietly Changed. Have You Noticed? | QDaily Research Lab

Young people care about more and more things when it comes to politeness and order, and they are touchy about privacy and the distance between people. Most of the time, the order they define means clearer boundaries between people and more space for themselves.

How do you define “politeness”?

Or, put another way: these days, when do you feel you have been treated rudely, feel offended, or feel some degree of anger?

We found that young people today register those two questions mainly in two kinds of settings.

The first (unfortunately) is when they are in the same room as their parents and elders.

In a survey the QDaily Research Lab published over this year's Spring Festival, “Your Peaceful-Coexistence Index With Your Parents and Elders,” 62% of respondents scored poorly — many moments of their holiday trip home could only be described as sitting on pins and needles. Apart from disagreements about daily routines and housework, most of the “lack of peace” still happens in the talk between generations.

Complaints that elders are “not reasonable enough” are nothing new either. For instance:

They love imposing their own ideas on you. Whatever stage your love life or marriage is at, they will drop you into a loop called “study hard – find a partner – get married – have kids – make the kids study hard,” and their expectations always sit one rung above the stage you are actually at, regardless of whether you want to (or can) move forward.

Their understanding of “privacy” also seems different from yours. They may only be trying to show concern about “how you're getting on in the big city,” but the delivery is heavy-handed: every time you meet, they fire off the three soul-searching questions — “How much do you make a month? Have you bought a car? When are you buying a house?”

What's worse is what comes next. You vaguely dodge your relatives' less-than-friendly questions, turn down a dinner or two, and (to head off more unpleasant topics) block them from seeing your Moments — and they practically explode on the spot, convinced that you are the rude, disrespectful one.

There is another sharp sense of politeness, and it shows up in public places — especially ones you have paid to be in.

In the QDaily Research Lab's surveys on the experience of malls, movie theaters, public transit and other settings, we found that how a public place makes you feel is largely decided by everyone else in it. Specifically, whether the staff and the people around you keep to order and good manners matters a great deal.

• A restaurant you finally hunted down that turned out to taste decent — except someone was smoking, and you wanted to blacklist the place.
• What shapes opinion of a gym is not just the equipment, but whether sales pitches follow you everywhere, and whether people hog the hair dryers and the machines for ages.
• At airports and train stations, the least bearable things are seat-hogging, loud talking, kids running around and cutting in line.
• At the movies, the seats and the screen matter, of course, but what breaks people most — and what most affects the whole viewing experience — is the quality of the audience around you, and the share of kids who won't stay quiet.
• At department stores and Watsons, what young people find least bearable are sales clerks who won't leave you alone (while your parents may think the clerks who ignore you are the ones in the wrong).
• When you're waiting in line, what can't you stand? A QDaily Research Lab survey found that more annoying than “not knowing how much longer the wait will be” (16.4%) is “the person at the front picking up tickets for ten other people” (19.0%).
• Besides “line rage” there is “road rage.” In a survey on “What personality-changing behavior have you seen the moment someone gets behind the wheel?” we found that many people seem possessed by a second self once they start driving: other cars flashing their high beams at the wrong moment, crawling along and blocking the road ahead, cutting in and overtaking at will, and not moving the instant the light turns green all count as serious rudeness.

In short, on the question of what counts as politeness, the younger generation's answers — and the behavior that follows from them — look different from their elders'. They care about more and more things when it comes to politeness and order, and they are touchy about privacy and the distance between people; most of the time, the order they define means clearer boundaries between people and more space for themselves. There are so many moments when they want to shout “Leave me alone!”

As we have said in several earlier pieces, they care a great deal about “first-world problems”: “the smaller and more trivial the matter, the more it resonates.” When they spend money, they are getting pickier about details too. The order of a place decides their experience, and a merchant's pitch and conversation have to come in a form they don't find off-putting.

Why?

The French scholar Frédéric Rouvillois traces the constantly shifting definition of politeness in A History of Politeness (《礼貌史》), and argues that it is shaped by every part of a society's structure. A hundred-odd years ago, politeness still rested on differences of class between people; today more people agree that the rules of politeness apply to everyone. And as life grows more varied, what sits behind “politeness” keeps changing and growing richer — road rage after cars became common, say, or the whole code of conduct for virtual communities that arrived with the internet.

As for young people specifically, a report in Time lists two reasons they appear more sensitive: young people as a group come from more varied cultures, so they have to show respect for many different ones. And a survey reported by The Economist also found that young people are, on the whole, more respectful of minority groups — but if one minority group offends another, they turn on it faster too.

The growing number of millennials has also let this kind of talk set the tone. An article in Elite Daily says young people find it easier to make their voices heard on social networks and elsewhere; once a phrase has been defined as a concept, more and more people start noticing it. “Bratty kids” put every human offspring in public under a spotlight; “emotional intelligence” matters more and more, and how well anyone — celebrity or ordinary person — speaks and treats others is all too easy to haul out and examine.

On this business of young people growing more sensitive about order and politeness, we also found the following.

In More and More Situations, Young People Want Space of Their Own

1. In young people's eyes, high emotional intelligence at work is not about cozying up to everyone. In a QDaily Research Lab callout asking “What does high emotional intelligence look like at work?” the most-upvoted answer was in fact “do your own job well, and don't ask about anything outside it” (700 upvotes).

2. They can't stand instant familiarity. One QDaily Research Lab poll sums it up: “I can't stand the cutesy tone of app push notifications — I want a cold, clear spring instead.” Besides the style that drew the most complaints in that callout, “Master, you haven't come to see little me in so long,” young people also hate the way push notifications and customer-service reps call everyone “dear” and “darling” — because we are clearly not close, and it's just strange when you do that.

3. On lifting the ban on phones during flights, our survey found that people's biggest worry was not safety (11.7%) but “does this mean there will be no escaping people sending WeChat voice messages, ever?” (29.8%). The gap between those two numbers tells you how much young travelers resent people shouting into their phones in a sealed space.

4. How much do young people care about shutting out other people's noise and keeping some space of their own? On the big shopping forums, noise-canceling headphones have become a hot category in the consumption-upgrade trend. A New Yorker article also looked at the rise of headphones and the jump in sales in recent years, and asked: do people love music more, or do they love sealing themselves off more?

5. Novelty goods like phone cases printed with “none of your damn business” and T-shirts that say “I refuse to get married” belong to the same family. The young person who buys the “none of your damn business” case may not dare say the words out loud, but can't help picturing the moment of slapping the phone down on the table, slogan side up, when they don't feel like dealing with a relative.

6. Besides avoiding everyday conversation that touches on privacy, young people take protecting their online privacy seriously. Surveys by Forbes and USA Today both show that millennials care more about the security of their data online. In our survey, alongside worries like “crossing out my name on the delivery label,” young people's privacy habits also include “I don't want anyone looking at my phone” — and insisting on knowing these private things is treated as an offense and a rudeness.

7. In our callout on “What phone etiquette should a decent modern person follow?” the rules that drew the most support included: when someone shows you a photo on their phone, never swipe left or right; and don't peek at other people's passwords or at whatever they are looking at — don't even look as though you might.

8. App makers should also think hard before going all in on social features, especially the kind that shares things to Moments without asking. In a callout on “What do you do online that you don't actually want tied to socializing?” the top answer was “when you reply to a comment on someone's Moments post, everyone who liked it gets a notification,” followed by “I memorized a few vocabulary words on my phone, tapped a few extra times on the completion page, and somehow it got shared to Moments,” and “I don't want people I know to find my Douban account — the books and films I'm on there are for my Douban neighbors only.”

They Put Rules First — Kids, Elders and Relatives Are No Excuse for Breaking Them

1. As with the run of “dinner-table communication crises with elders” above, “your elders care about you” is not enough to shift the place that privacy and self-determination hold in young people's minds.

2. The same goes for children. Part of why “bratty kids” are so widely disliked is that their parents keep saying “he's just a kid, he doesn't know any better” and “how can you hold a grudge against a child?”

3. They dislike freeloaders. In a callout on “Which kind of freeloader annoys you most?” the most-upvoted answer showed young people agree that “even if someone is my friend, if a search engine can solve it, I'd rather they didn't bother me with it.” Never mind the people who take advantage of a friend's job skills and rope them in as a free designer, free translator or free doctor.

4. Politeness during the morning rush matters too — people who act as though they are the only ones on the whole road in a hurry can give it a rest. The rule young people agree on here is to read the situation: never block the walkway or clog the subway doors.

So You Can Never Raise the “It's for Your Own Good” Flag, Push Your Own Preferences Onto Others and Decide for Them

1. In a callout on “What do you hate most about going out to a gathering?” we found that young people hate being pressed to drink most of all, especially the kind that ties whether you drink to friendship and closeness. Maddening.

2. A lot of advertising and marketing is no better. The talking-past-you logic of “you don't like vegetables, so you should drink juice” also reads to them as an offense.

3. They also dislike any discrimination, even the subtle kind, and they are quicker to spot it — “the skincare you should be using at 30,” say, or “women-only parking spaces.”

4. Even their main reasons for disliking a film, TV show or variety show are often “this is laying on the life lessons a bit thick” and “who are you to teach me how to live?”

The Spread of Social Networks Has Brought New Etiquette Puzzles Too

Young people have plenty to say about the etiquette of the new era, too. Our callouts “What's your most hated way of chatting?” and “Which WeChat habits do you hate most?” both drew a lot of responses. Here we found some genuinely two-sided answers:

1. Before you message someone about something, should you first ask “you there?”

2. How should WeChat's voice-message feature actually be used? When is it fine to send someone a voice message, and is it all right to reply to one with text?

3. The spread of social networks and the growing number of platforms is a nuisance of its own. Once people get used to WeChat, fewer and fewer of them call to discuss anything — but when there is work to sort out, which is the rude choice: phoning, or talking about work on WeChat?

4. In a callout on “What do you hate most about eating with other people?” respondents said one after another that someone playing with their phone at the table is more awkward than bragging and the like. But isn't playing with your phone at the table exactly how you relieve the awkwardness?

5. There are more and more social dilemmas with no good answer — such as exactly when you are supposed to like someone's Moments post.

6. With an acquaintance you might not see again for three years, should you politely add “let's get a meal sometime” at the end of a conversation? Is that a necessary pleasantry that hasn't gone out of date, or insincerity anyone can see through at a glance?

Just as the “heh heh,” “smile” and “goodbye” emoji have all taken on new meanings, the way people use social networks keeps changing, and young people's definition of politeness keeps changing with it. Maybe later on all these questions will get new definitions — and whoever doesn't pick up on them in time will be read, once again, as impolite.

Cover image and in-body illustrations: Lin Xiaoyao