The Four Second Rule: Keeping Your Honor Clean in a Civilized world.
A simple trick to make sure that bullies practice their foul trade far from the blazing radiance of your fiery gaze.
Whether you’re Terry Crews, an attractive intern, or just some guy breathing oxygen and taking up space. Sooner or later, somebody is going to show you disrespect. It could be, a dismissive comment, an inappropriate back massage, mispronouncing your name, forgetting your birthday, or intentionally misidentifying your gender. No matter the form of the disrespect, the consequences are serious. Teasing turns into bullying, you can lose respect for yourself, and other people will swoop in to relieve their pent up stress by mistreating you. Fortunately, much like dropping a $5 candy bar onto the floor of a movie theater, these incidents can be overcome with clear thinking and decisive action. All you have to do is pick up your honor and dust it off in 4 seconds.
When you receive an insults you have a narrow window to throw the insult back in a way that settles the matter and ensures you won’t be treated like that again. If you ignore it longer than that, out of misguided politeness or professionalism, not only will the insult start to fester inside you and reduce your quality of life, but your chances of being repeatedly victimized increase. Just like any other type of hygiene, the faster you cleanup the mess, the easier it is to get rid of the smell.
The magic of the four second rule is based on the rhythm of personal interactions. When a person does something to another, good, bad or neutral.
1)They automatically form an image of the way their action will affect the other person. If I give a friend’s child candy, I might predict my friend Karen will be happy because I showed kindness to her child.
2)After acting, we check for social cues to see if our prediction was accurate. For example my friend might say “Tell the nice man Thank you!” in a warm tone of voice, indicating my action pleased her.
3)As a natural extension my action, I mentally update my image of my relationship with my friend to include the extra data about how she is likely to perceive my actions. Since the vast majority of human interaction follows this pattern, my three step behavior is considered reasonable.
Here’s how this cycle fits into the emotional self defense model. During stage 1 a person forms the idea of how their actions will affect their subject. They may predict that the actions will be welcome or that they are undesired, offensive, or harmful. We can often guess what they intended but we can’t know for sure. A person has plausible deniability that they did not anticipate that their actions would be unwelcome, although they can still be held accountable. We’ve all accidentally offended people. That’s why stage 2 is so important.
In stage 2 actors receive social feedback from the subject of their actions. Bullies intentionally provoke hurt, unhappy reactions because they get pleasure from them. It’s really no different than they way a dog enjoys the squeaking sound his toy makes, but that doesn’t give them the right to harm others. People who are legitimately innocent of any harmful intent, also monitor responses to their actions. Even if they’ve just offended you down to your core, they may have been expecting a positive response. Maybe they didn’t know or simply forgot that you were boycotting the product they gave you? Stage 2 is your opportunity to absorb what has been done, generate feedback, and then watch as the your interlocutor processes the feedback. Stage 2 is the interval evolution has set aside for the purpose of data collection to refine social interaction. It’s the perfect opportunity to react to what another person has done in a way that will condition their future behavior.
In stage 3 your behavior will form the basis of future interactions. If you showed visible discomfort but didn’t provide any disincentives against future abuse, sensitive people will pick up on your pain and avoid repeating their actions again. The same behavior will encourage bullying and fail to discourage people who aren’t quick on the uptake. Any future attempts to redress the situation will be much less effective, and will almost certainly involve further humiliation. You’ll either have to “ask the person to stop”, threaten them in cold blood, or show weakness by seeking the help of a third party. In any case, you’ll be upset for a lot more than four seconds.
Going back to my example, suppose my friend has decided that she’s not going to allow her child to have candy. In real life I would probably have considered this, and asked before I gave the candy, but if I had reached man’s estate in my birth country of Jordan, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. My well intended actions would have caused Karen to feel “bad”. If she chooses to react positively out of politeness, she strengthens my conviction that my gesture is welcome. I will do it more. In fact, if I see her looking nervous around me, I‘ll give her child two pieces of candy, just to “cheer her up”.
Eventually, my repeated usurpation of her parental right to decide what her child ate, might fester in to resentment. Then one day she’ll come up to me and say “Can you please stop giving Timmy candy? It’s my decision as a parent if he eats sugar!” This would be a blow to our relationship, I’d feel like all my kindness was thrown back in my face, and she’d never really forgive me for all the things I’ve already done to her. The only way I’d come out ahead is if I’d been sadistically, trying to make her upset, and in that case I would have been waiting for this moment and will use it to harm her more. “Wait what? You don’t want Timmy to have candy? But, I bought this giant jar of it just for him! Can he at least finish the jar I bought him before I stop giving him more?” ect. You have to stay ahead of this stuff. Otherwise, you’re going to get the classic “I think you’re making too big a deal of this” speech. which is the well practiced end goal of any serious professional bully’s campaign of cruelty. Not that you might not deserve some of this. Carob is not a chocolate substitute.
That’s the negative view, here’s the helpful part. If you address insults within the ordained time window, you can prevent insults while increasing your social standing. Furthermore, you can treat these insults as self contained incidents rather than allowing them to become an ongoing source of stress. Imagine that I know my friend doesn’t want her child to have sugar and I want to teach her a lesson for being uptight. My real motivation is a congenital tendency to enjoy making other people feel helpless, but who’s counting. I see the child far enough away from his mother that I have a decent chance of the boy eating the candy before his mother can stop him. My friend Karen, sees me and says “Don’t eat that Timmy.” then she turns to me and calmly says, “Don’t give him candy.”
Game over. I can’t get mad, and I can’t try again. I even have to be extra careful about ticking her off in the next few days. I have no choice but to check her off my list of potential victims, and forget the whole thing. As an act of self-preservation, my mind moves her up in my social dominance schema, thereby causing me to like her more than I would have if she’d gone along with my teasing.
Here’s another one: I try to give my secretary an inappropriate massage. She brushes my hand away before I can compress her shoulder, turns to make eye contact, and says “No thank you!” I have no choice but to say “of course not”, never do it again, take her more seriously as a person, and involuntarily wonder “Nice girl, I wonder if she’d like my nephew.” Let someone get a couple of squeezes in, and you’ve bought a one way ticket to “oh come on, you look so tense.” Now you’ve got to put up with the situation or contact human resources.
The requirement for immediacy applies to everyone. I let a guy at the gym give me a shoulder rub, and talk about how “meaty” I was. I don’t regret it, he seemed pretty skilled and telling him to stop felt like leaving money on the table. However, If I wanted him to stop, at this point I’d have to break his thumbs. I can’t easily go back and re-write the social context of 6 back rubs.
To summarize, the formula for redressing insults is to react immediately and moderately. Don’t “take it”, just politely give it back. This method takes away the bullies precious deniability that it seemed okay at the time, uses immediate negative reinforcement as a teaching tool, and remolds the opinions and expectations of others by taking advantage of the way our brains evolved to manage social interactions.
Crucially, this is advice for redressing insults not threats or crimes. Threats do not attack people’s social standing, they indicate danger. The best way to deal with threats is to take all threats 100% seriously, even you are unsure. If somebody says they are going to hurt you, call the police as quickly as you’d correct a mispronunciation of the name you chose after your transition. If you clearly tell someone you don’t want a hug, and they indicate that they might hug you again, that’s a threat and you should go to human resources right away. This is not inconsistent with our method of handling insults, it simply extends the principles of decisiveness and negative reinforcement into a different domain. When someone insults you, show your friends you can handle your shit, but when someone threatens you, don’t hesitate to call on your friends or society for help.
