Violence and friendliness are usually thought to be opposites.
Congeniality, hospitality, openness, and warmth are often assumed to preclude aggression and mayhem. What is frequently missed, however, is how often these two polar opposites seem to go together.
The paradox of politeness is that violence and friendliness are not opposing forces. Rather, in many cultures, these two forces work together and reinforce each other, creating societies where what is on the surface is vastly different from what is occurring underneath.Violence, or the threat of violence, can create a society where friendliness, congeniality, and politeness are the norm. And, as we will show, these norms for politeness and anger-suppression can in turn foster violence by driving conflict below the surface, depriving people of the opportunities to work out their differences, and ultimately leading to a full blown explosion when one person has gone too far. Our own empirical research has focused on the U.S. South, but we start by reviewing anthropological work showing that the same processes may occur elsewhere around the world.