You should not let the particulars of your relationship with someone affect how nice you are to them. And vice versa – you should not let how nice someone is to you dictate the particulars of your relationship with them. Surprising as it may seem, those things should be uncorrelated in your mind, because they’re uncorrelated in reality.
Being nice, polite, and respectful is virtually costless; it takes so little to do it that it basically rounds to zero. But what do we know about things that cost nothing?
- If something costs nothing, and has any upside at all (such as making you or another person feel nice) then you should do it almost all the time.
- If something costs nothing, then someone doing it is not a good indicator of their commitment to anything else.
As people if they’ll sign a petition to open a library and you’ll get plenty of signatures. Ask people if they’ll pay a dollar to sign said petition, and you’ll still get some – but fewer. Make it ten dollars and it will be far fewer. That’s because the cost of signing the petition is so low that people will do it even if they barely care about a library – heck, even if they don’t care at all, but just want to be nice. But when there’s a real cost attached, people respond accordingly.
So if someone is nice to you, that doesn’t mean they’re trustworthy. It doesn’t mean they’re loyal. It doesn’t even mean they’re smart. Anyone can be nice.
You should always be polite unless absolutely necessary to do otherwise. But you should also evaluate people on their actual actions, not just how nice they are in conversation.
The Opportunity Machine 