The perpetuation and confrontation of incivility: New theoretical and empirical insights

This symposium brings together recent advances on the perpetuation and confrontation of incivility. The four talks advance understanding on the psychological motives underlying incivility, the social response to behaving uncivilly and confronting incivility, and the best methods for responding to incivility for both the perpetrators and victims of uncivil acts. In particular, this symposium shows that people may perpetuate incivility because it elevates their feelings of competence, power, and agency, even though it actually decreases their status in the eyes of others, It further shows that directly confronting a perpetrator of incivility about his/her incivility minimizes this miscalibration between feelings of status and conferred status. Given this potential benefit of confrontation, the symposium further examines whether directly confronting uncivil behavior is socially valued and whether alternative responses to addressing incivility exist that benefit both the accused and accuser in ways that direct confrontation does not.