Tyler Watts is a professor of economics and management at Ferris State University.
Finance
It’s not ‘Midwest Nice’ to break the rules
![It’s Not “Midwest Nice” to Break the Rules](https://blogaid.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Its-not-Midwest-Nice-to-break-the-rules.jpg)
Wisconsin comedian Charlie Berens has a great routine about it 4 Way Stops in the Midwest. Midwestern drivers are so nice and submissive that they will endlessly wave at the other guy at the stop sign, even if they got there first and have the right of way. Like any good comedy, it’s funny because it’s at least somewhat true. As a small-town Midwesterner, I can vouch for the authenticity of the joke. In the past month, I’ve had three separate stop sign incidents in the Midwest where the other driver, who had the right of way, tried to yield and wave me through out of turn. Now I’m a proud Midwesterner, but maybe I’m just not that nice, or maybe something really bothers me that people don’t follow the rules. When this happens to me, I like to point to the stop sign, trying to let the other driver know that there is a set set of rules and that, having undergone proper driver training, I expect you to follow them. One time I actually rolled down the window and shouted, “I have a stop sign!” and insisted the other driver keep going (in this case she didn’t even have a stop sign – it’s worse than Berens knows!)
The last time this happened, I got so irritated 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 reflect well on the people in my part of the country? However, I had an epiphany in the car: I realized that the attempt at “niceness” was actually annoying, because it disrupted my strongly founded expectations about what should happen based on a very clear and known set of rules. I felt like Walter Sobchak of The Great Lebowski: “Am I the only one here giving a (expletive) about the rules?!” (Don’t worry, I didn’t come close to threatening the other driver). Simply put, the other driver’s action, while well-intentioned, was not pleasant in terms of outcome. It was irritating, it led to confusion and delays, which, although minor, were still irritating. Rules are meant to be followed, not arbitrarily set aside on a whim for the benefit of a stranger. We could argue in good faith about whether a particular rule is fair and appropriate, but in cases where the rules are clearly fair and designed to generate smooth social interactions between strangers – such as stop signs – not following the rules is a antisocial measure. action.
Then the bigger 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-breaking and societal decay. The stop sign thing is emblematic of a bigger problem. It’s true that stop sign makers are generally harmless, so maybe I should take it easy. 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 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 short list, I’m sure you can think of a few yourself:
- parents want to be kind to their children, so they refrain from harsh discipline and their children become unruly brats
- Teachers try to be nice to students so that they don’t give low grades or critical feedback
- attempts to “stop the stigma” associated with bad behavior such as drug, alcohol or porn addiction, because it stigmatizes people (literally: marking them with shame) is seen as mean
- abandoning the ‘rules’ of family life, for example expecting parents to marry and fully commit to raising their children, because this is judgmental
- suspending meritocracy to help the ‘disadvantaged’ access better jobs or careers
This last example is deeply concerning and shows up in DEI-inspired programs that weaken or eliminate competency requirements for the sake of greater representation of disadvantaged groups. Many commentators on the right are concerned about such attempts in the aviation industry to “diversify” their pilot corps. If competency standards are relaxed and there is enough evidence to back up the stories, we could see deadly consequences when undertrained, underqualified “diversity hires” make fatal mistakes while piloting a passenger plane.
So yeah, maybe we should rethink “niceness.” 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 result: identifying a causal effect when it is not true, for example attributing effectiveness to a drug when in reality it was not, and arbitrarily arbitrating the results of clinical trials were a coincidence. A Type II error is a false negative: the finding that the drug was not effective when in fact it was, but perhaps the clinical trial was not properly calibrated to capture its true impact.
Being gratuitously mean – being an idiot – is a Type I error. You lash out at your wife or children over an innocent mistake. The bad attitude and outburst of anger are not justified, you should not have decided in favor of your anger. This problem is usually easy to spot, and the solution is rarely controversial: no one likes a jerk, and we all know one when we see one. But being too nice is difficult; it is a type II error. You have the right to yell, or perhaps just use foul language, because the other person misbehaved and deserved social sanction. But most of us don’t like confrontation, and it’s often easier to just put on a nice face, don’t call out the other person’s bad behavior, and just sneak away. This is the path of least resistance. I admit I’m guilty: I’m non-confrontational and have probably pushed aside too many bad actions.
So what should be done about the excessive kindness epidemic? I’m thinking of setting up seminars on optimal anger: “Hi, I’m Tyler and my love language is tough love. Do not you like it? Get over it!” Joking aside, it’s tricky. There are no easy answers, and as the greatest living economist Thomas Sowell so eloquently said, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” As an economist, all I can ask is that people recognize the problem: it is just as possible to be too nice, as it is also possible to be too mean. To paraphrase Martin Luther, you can fall from either side of the horse. It can be bad not to be nice; it can be bad to be too nice. The trick is to find an optimal solution, to balance the tradeoffs between the problems. Too mean (Type I error) is usually obvious, so the key is to critically assess all our actions and strive to recognize when we may be slipping into the ‘too nice’ Type II error. Strictness has its place. If insisting on following the rules makes me seem jerky to my Midwestern cohorts, so be it. If that’s the price of living in a world where the rules work for everyone’s benefit, I’m willing to pay it.