Best answer

How politeness and civility make people more persuasive. Also, 7 other things worth your time.

Sometimes, time is short. You've got something to say, and you want to make it stick.

If so, you’ll want to know about a study in the journal MIS Quarterly that suggests a simple trick to make arguments seem more persuasive. It's called the “politeness bias.”

The researchers (Shun-Yang Lee of the University of Connecticut, Huaxia Rui of the University of Rochester, and Andrew Whinston of the University of Texas at Austin) studied conversations on Stack Exchange, which is a network of question-and-answer websites and communities.

The key thing they found: The more polite an answer was, the more likely it was to be rated highly and chosen as the "best answer."

It's not ironclad. If the person offering an opinion was perceived as a true expert, that could overcome an impolite response, the researchers said. But all other things being equal, impolite answers were less likely to be regarded as correct.

Here's an example, cited in a summary by Cornell University's Amy Newman. A gig worker had a…