Passive aggressiveness and higher social economic class.

In My Humble Opinion
121

Thanks for the opinions guys, guess I’m just not going to get the type of discussion I was hoping for in this thread. If anybody buys into the argument that upper classes are more covertly aggressive (or passive aggressive or whatever you want to call it) than lower classes, PM me or point me to a discussion where that tenet is axiomatic and we can discuss the “whys” of it… I’m writing a little article on this and would appreciate the insight.

Again, not interested in debating whether or not it’s the case–from my position it is. Just interested in hearing WHY from those who share that initial opinion.

thanks again

122

OK, accepting your premise (which I don’t especially), you might say that wealthier and better educated people have other ways than physical and/or verbal aggression to assert themselves. They have material stuff and presumably the intellectual results of their education as ways to flaunt, and thus don’t need to win pissing contests with bombast or boasting or popping up with random claims for attention. As far as they are concerned, they’ve pretty much already won. Behavior that demonstrates an effort to gain attention is viewed as beneath them. They don’t have anything to prove.

On the other hand, I could argue just as easily that wealthier and more educated people have less fear of exposing themselves in a bad light, and thus are more readily able and willing to be friendly and/or overtly aggressive, because the consequences of making a fool of themselves are less. Either argument is equally plausible, and I suspect you could find as many examples to support one as you could for the other.

Seriously, if you’ve decided your conclusion up front, you should have no problem coming up with explanations for it. It is, after all, your own conclusion.

123

Or perhaps because their parents spend a lot of time teaching them that is correct behavior. Which they learned from their parents. Which their parents learned from their parents.

And some of that has logical reasons. There is a sort of obscure “rule” that you don’t compliment people’s possessions - particularly things like their dishes. You know why? Because 100 years ago its pretty likely that you inherited your dishes and isn’t at all uncommon for you to hate the dishes you got from your Grandmother. So saying to someone “I love your dishes” isn’t likely to compliment their tastes at all, and might remind them that their cousin got a much nicer set.

Another logical reason is that “society” is small and was smaller. You see the same people at the same parties, the same clubs, the same Wednesday afternoon card or golf game - for YEARS. So you don’t escalate aggression which might make everyone uncomfortable for years. Besides, business runs on inside deals in these circles - you don’t piss off someone who might turn out to be the partner at your future son-in-laws firm.

Within these circles the behavior being described isn’t seen as aggressive in any form - passive or otherwise.

124

I’m sure you can find annecdotal examples of all sorts of behavior, however in my experience, as a general rule, the more money you have the more educated you tend to be, the more you tend to have to lose by making a jackass of yourself, the more likely you are to have pursued more intellectual careers over physical ones and the less inclined you are to fits of violence and screaming.

125

Hmm… well those are a start and I appreciate the effort. Perhaps it has to with an ability (or lack thereof) to communicate with words? Upper classes have a larger vocabulary. It would be interesting to do a study to see whether the size of one’s vocabulary has an effect on one’s ability to deal with stressful interpersonal situations without becoming flustered.

126

This has been mentioned, but I can’t get past the fact that the OP and several of the people who agree with him (her?) are misusing “passive-aggressive”. Passive-aggressiveness is a strategy used to resist requests and expectations by one’s peers or superiors (parents, employers) by superficially appearing to comply, but sabotaging the task or situation through deliberate (although not necessarily conscious) inefficiency, forgetfulness, obstructiveness, etc. The Master speaks; or, if you prefer, a medically-slanted article.

Being non-confrontational, unusually patient or unusually polite is not passive-aggressive. Being openly rude by snubbing someone you don’t need to associate with, or covertly rude by avoiding them, is also not passive-aggressive.

That said, I do think more-educated people, and people of higher socioeconomic class, are less confrontational and more likely to use social cues (such as pointedly ignoring people) to manage undesired behavior, and are also more likely to simply detach themselves from the offending person (by, for instance, not inviting them back). Different social groups have very different expectations for how people are supposed to respond to social challenges, which affects behavior at a very deep level (for instance, see this synopsis of a psychological experiment on insults), and more highly educated / higher-SEC groups tend to be more strongly socialized to “not make a scene” whereas lower educational / lower-SEC groups tend to put more emphasis on standing up to challenges. The former strategy is seen as wimpy or dishonest by the lower classes and the latter strategy is seen as tacky, stupidly macho, or demonstrating a lack of restraint by the upper classes.

Of course, much of the behavior Wunky is complaining about is simply jerkass-ness.

127

We’re past that point. Call it whatever you like.

Right, we’ve established that, the question now is WHY.

128

I half-see where you’re coming from, OP, but you’re doing yourself a terrible disservice by taking the attitude you’re presenting in this thread. Personally, I’d find your conversational tics annoying and attention-seeking, but it’s really no worse than other conversational tics I’ve observed in people.

It isn’t a matter of upper vs. lower class. The professional schools overwhelmingly attract a certain personality type and because of the service professional element + competition, everyone trends toward a certain standard of behaviour (code).

  1. The average professional school person can be summed up as a “smart jock”.

  2. People’s interests trend towards the mainstream

  3. Looking down on all these people as “passive aggressive,” “mired in class trappings” or “boring” doesn’t do you any favours. All you’re doing is ruining your future network. Enjoy people for who/what they are and take your social cues from them.

The biggest difference between my attitude when I went to law school 8 years ago and my attitude today towards my business school classmates is that I don’t look at them as “friends” in the traditional sense. They’re my network, associates with whom I plan to maintain friendly relationships. Therefore, they don’t really need to see the real me. Most of my “true” friends are now all artsy Ph.ds that I met when I was 18 years old and in undergrad-they accept me for who I am and I can act dorky or silly around them without any repercussions (and all 5 of them are definitely quite upper crust).

It’s only now that I realise professional school classmates accept you for your long-term potential as a valuable contact, and that behaving in a certain way (far outside of the mainstream), diminishes that perception.

Personally, I am enjoying business school a lot more than law school, and my sister (who made the same mistake in med school) gets along with her residency classmates way better than her med school people. Both of us were really young when we went to grad school, so it took us some time to figure this shit out.

129

There is definitely a difference of directness in communication between the social classes, and someone expressing disapproval in less-than-direct ways might indeed be viewed by someone used to direct communication as being passive-aggressive.

130

Actually we aren’t. Calling it passive aggressive is wrong and its rude and offensive. Persisting in calling it passive-aggressive makes you look like you were raised in a barn. How is that for direct? You will get a much better discussion if you discuss why manners and the directness of communication differ so much by SEC. (And probably write a better paper that has less of a chance of risking offending whomever is grading it - something that usually isn’t a good idea). And frankly, I’d start a new thread for it. This one was Lakai’s from a situation in Feburary that she had come to terms with, and she probably doesn’t want advice from people who don’t realize that the situation she is referring to is six months old.

131

It’s not an answerable question. I mean, the immediate and apparent answer would be that poorer, less educated people were more crowded together, and in those wealthy enough to spread out, aloofness became a social grace. But the fact is, Japan is believed by some to have developed an elaborately courteous culture steeped in ritual because they are so crowded in together.

I mean, it’s like looking at someone’s personality. You can look at events in the person’s childhood and nod wisely, saying “Ah HA! That’s why s/he is the way s/he is.” But, in fact, you can find many other people who grew up with similar conditions who turned out completely to be different in personality. The factors that go into creating a personality are so numerous and so subtle (which genes are expressed in the womb and why? Did the distant nod Dad gave Timmy for a greeting one time when he was busy thinking about work scar Timmy for life?) that it is unlikely we will ever get a true science of personality development. And that’s for a single personality!

Now multiply that by millions and the diverse ancestral cultures those individuals draw upon to bring into the mix that is our contemporary society. Look at the fact that other contemporary cultures may vary hugely in their norms. There are a fair number of cultures, both contemporary and historic, where the poorest and least educated keep/kept their mouths shut, and where for a poor person to start a physical fight would be to invite severe punitive measures. There are no universals here, no conclusions you can draw about societies in general.

The closest thing I can come to a generalization is that the higher status a person is, the more self-controlled s/he is expected to be. Those who do not control themselves tend to be scorned, by history and gossip, at least - think Caligula and Nero. But the form of self-control can be aloofness, or it can be elaborate and public ritual, or it can be a high degree of friendliness (noblesse oblige), or whatever else a given society teaches its elites.

Then consider that in a nation the size of the US, some 260 million, give or take, there are a whole lot of sub-cultures, and a single individual probably occupies a different spot in the pecking order of each sub-culture in which s/he participates, because the values of each sub-culture differ. S/he may or may not adjust his/her behavior according to circumstances, and this may or may not affect status within the sub-culture. Where birth or something like beauty is the over-riding consideration, behavior probably doesn’t matter as much as it does, say, in a professional association (although it does have some impact). But in most sub-cultures, behavior is important.

Also, I agree with Dangerosa.

132

See Emmett Till

133

Well, one common hypothesis is that people in relatively powerless circumstances don’t have much to trade on except the opinions of their peers; a rich person can put up a bank bond as a guarantee of trustworthiness and good behavior whereas a poor person can only offer their reputation. So defending that reputation by not accepting slights or misbehavior becomes more important.

Another, rather odd, hypotheses, traces it to differences in culture among herding versus agrarian societies. Farmers can’t easily move their farms and thus are stuck with their neighbors, which promotes getting along, but they have less risk of total bankruptcy through resource theft (it’s relatively easy to keep track of who is living where to establish prior claims). Herders, conversely, have highly mobile resources (animals) that can be completely stolen, so they have an incentive to portray themselves as take-no-nonsense types who will invariably punish wrongdoers. These cultures, it is proposed, have persisted through the subsequent industrialization and urbanization of the US. This hypothesis has certain flaws (cough) but it’s a neat idea.

134

I think the term is “scholar athlete”.:wink:

Having gone to undergrad and MBA school as well as 15 years of my career with these people, I think I’m fairly qualified to describe their thought processes. These sort of people (of which I think it is fair to call myself one) typically have a “work hard / play hard” attitude. We tend to be joiners who participate in high school and college sports, fraternities, company softball and the like. We usually enjoy drinking and maybe some drug use, but not so much that we will fail out of school or get fired. In fact, it probably only helps being able to drink with some Partner until 3am. We are ever mindful of the goals - academic, professional, social, etc. We tend to be confident, polite and even outgoing and friendly, but often aloof if you are not perceived to be in our class. We are extremely mindful of appearance, perceptions and relationships, even if we don’t specifically discuss it.

To put it another way, I did not go to college to “find myself”. I went with a specific purpose build the knowledge and credentials I would need to be successful in the working world. I don’t have an inclination to waste time and energy on people who are going to hinder me professionally or socially.

135

This is pretty much in keeping with why I left my career as an attorney to go back to business school-I did a lot of research whether I could make the transition to the career I want to pursue without the MBA and decided the barrier of entry would be too high given my lack of quant background from undergrad. I’ve found that b-schoolers tend to be a lot more focused than people in law because law school skews younger, but for the most part, it’s the same personality type, if a little more immature.

I tend to stay away from the obvious personality disorders and attention seekers because they’re always swirling with too much dramz and are usually the biggest users (in the sense of wanting too many favours without returning any). Being quirky but nice doesn’t get an automatic write-off from me, though.

Sorry, but I kind of disagree. I’ve learned my lesson from my go-around in law and have put up a nice Christian Louboutin-shod front to form friendly relationships with people with this worldview and appreciate them for who they are, but I think it’s really limiting to be this much of a snob in the long run. This reads like a life-plan for being middle management forever. I think people who aspire to live life like this tend to be very competent individuals, but also lacking in vision.

136

I don’t think we are really in disagreement. I would say that for 90% of these people, they really don’t have any sort of life plan or vision besides “fitting in”, whether it’s with their high school soccer team, their college fraternity or their the folks at whatever law firm, consulting firm or investment bank they work for. And that’s fine for some people. You can have a pretty comfortable life making $100,000 -300,000 a year in middle management. And I would agree that these people limit themselves by becoming too snobish and too insular in their thinking.

137

Sounds like you might be buying into the hype a bit. Every B-School student thinks that in 5 years after graduation they will be CEO of a Fortune 1000 company, running a hedge fund or running an investment bank trading desk. The reality is that most of them to end up in middle management.

138

“Bless your heart” seldom fails.