How to Show Respect Before Anyone Has to Ask
By: Joy Stephenson-Laws, JD, Founder and President
Five Minutes in a Conference Room
Early in my law career, I went to opposing counsel's office to take the deposition of an expert witness. The court reporter, the expert and opposing counsel were already at the conference table talking. I said good morning and took my seat, and they kept talking. I felt disrespected and annoyed. Then I became calm, waited until the time the deposition was set to start, and turned to the court reporter to begin.
What they left out was a small act: stopping to greet the person who had just walked in. In my experience, people fall short in the moments before anyone has to ask.
What Happens When People Are Ignored
Psychologists have studied how people respond to brief experiences of being ignored. In a field experiment published in 2012, a research assistant walked along a busy campus path, past passersby one at a time, and either made eye contact, made eye contact and smiled, or looked toward them without meeting their eyes, as if looking through them. The people who were looked through reported feeling more disconnected than the people who got eye contact. They were strangers passing on a path, and the researchers described the effect as momentary. [1]
A larger body of research uses a computer game called Cyberball. A participant tosses a virtual ball with what they believe are other players. In a typical version, the other players stop throwing the ball to the excluded participant after the first two tosses. A 2015 analysis of 120 experiments, with 11,869 participants, found a large average adverse effect of exclusion when comparing excluded and included participants immediately after the game. The studies measured outcomes such as belonging, self-esteem and mood. Most study samples consisted of young adults in the United States and other Western countries. [2]
Neither study examined a professional setting like that conference room. Both show how little it can take for a person to feel left out.
Respect Is Shown by One Person and Felt by Another
Management researchers Kristie Rogers and Blake Ashforth describe respect as something one person shows and another person perceives. In their framework there are two kinds: being valued as one of the group, and being valued for your own qualities and work. Their paper proposes a theory, drawing on earlier research. [3]
My own observation fits their framing. People learn what respect looks like from their families, cultures and workplaces, and those lessons differ. Some people expect to be addressed by title, and others find that stiff. Our intention to show respect does not guarantee that the other person will experience it that way. It helps to find out what respect looks like to them.
Feel. Pause. Act. When Someone Walks In
That morning I used Feel. Pause. Act. as the person left out: I felt annoyed, I became calm while I waited, and I started the deposition on time. The three people at the table could have used the same steps, and it would have taken them a few seconds:
Feel: notice your own state. You are in the middle of a conversation, and breaking it off may feel uncomfortable.
Pause: look up and notice who has just come in.
Act: stop, return the greeting, and bring the person into the room.
Five Ways to Show Respect First
Acknowledge people. Greet the person who walks in and bring them into the conversation. The eye-contact study shows how small an acknowledgment can be. [1]
Listen. A 2018 paper reported five experiments on listening, including one involving an imagined conversation. In three experiments, listeners were distracted by flickering computer screens or phone messages. Participants in the better-listening conditions reported less social anxiety and a clearer sense of their own opinions. Put the phone away, face the person, and let them finish. [4]
Ask what respect looks like to them. When you start working with someone new, ask how they like to be addressed and how they prefer to hear about a problem. Their preferences may differ from yours, so ask before you guess.
Leave room for privacy. If someone changes the subject or leaves a personal question unanswered, do not press them. This advice comes from my experience, and no study cited here tests it.
Keep your promises. In experiments involving imagined, remembered and actual promises, Ayelet Gneezy and Nicholas Epley found that broken promises received worse evaluations than kept promises. Exceeding a promise generally produced little additional appreciation. If you say you will call back by Friday, call by Friday. [5]
Respect When You Disagree
A deposition is adversarial. Opposing counsel and I represented clients whose positions conflicted, and that gave no one a reason to ignore me when I walked in. You can hear someone out fully and keep your own position.
What I Do Now
I no longer take depositions, though I may again someday. Since that morning, I am more aware when I am in the middle of a conversation and someone new joins us or appears. I also tend to anticipate when someone might feel uncomfortable, and I take steps to ease it before they have to say anything.
I play golf and belong to a golf club. When a new member joins, I expect they may feel uncomfortable, so I make a point of reaching out and inviting them to play.
When you do get it wrong and someone tells you, start with: "Help me understand. I want to get this right."
Joy Stephenson-Laws, JD, is the founding and managing partner of Stephenson, Acquisto & Colman, a healthcare litigation firm, and the founder and president of Proactive Health Labs, a national nonprofit focused on evidence-based health literacy. A healthcare attorney for more than forty years and a certified holistic wellness coach, she writes about how people can partner with their doctors without surrendering their own judgment.
Her books include Your Labs Are Fine. You're Not., Advice on Trial: The Beliefs You Inherited but Never Examined, From Chains to Wings: A Poetry Revolution for Healing,Secrets That Sparkle (and Secrets That Sting), and Minerals - The Forgotten Nutrient: Your Secret Weapon for Getting and Staying Healthy.
(This article is for general education and is not medical advice. It is meant to help you ask better questions, not to replace evaluation by a qualified clinician).
RESOURCES & FURTHER READING
Wesselmann, E. D., Cardoso, F. D., Slater, S., & Williams, K. D. (2012). To be looked at as though air: Civil attention matters. Psychological Science, 23(2), 166–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611427921
Hartgerink, C. H. J., van Beest, I., Wicherts, J. M., & Williams, K. D. (2015). The ordinal effects of ostracism: A meta-analysis of 120 Cyberball studies. PLoS ONE, 10(5), e0127002. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127002
Rogers, K. M., & Ashforth, B. E. (2017). Respect in organizations: Feeling valued as "we" and "me." Journal of Management, 43(5), 1578–1608. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206314557159
Itzchakov, G., DeMarree, K. G., Kluger, A. N., & Turjeman-Levi, Y. (2018). The listener sets the tone: High-quality listening increases attitude clarity and behavior-intention consequences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(5), 762–778. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217747874
Gneezy, A., & Epley, N. (2014). Worth keeping but not exceeding: Asymmetric consequences of breaking versus exceeding promises. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(7), 796–804. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550614533134