Out of the blue, someone is shockingly rude to you. You didn’t see it coming while shopping for groceries, asking a co-worker for directions, or waiting for the train—but someone angrily accuses you of something you know nothing about, or butts in front of you in line, or deliberately looks away when you’ve politely asked for assistance.

The rude incident stings and nags at you. Even if you handled it well in the moment or brushed it aside to get through a demanding day, it comes back to haunt you at 3:00 in the morning.

That ugly encounter, though brief and fleeting, still hurts. Do you wonder if you’re too sensitive to the bad behavior in the world and wish you could just toughen up and develop thicker skin?

Don’t take it personally, they say, right? But it’s not all about toughening up as an individual to cope alone. Recent research is showing us that random acts of rudeness can be highly distracting and damaging to individuals as well as organizations and institutions. Unexpected, sporadic incidents of incivility can have lasting consequences.

When a stranger in public “acts out” for some reason, even if you compassionately or rationally explain it to yourself (“everyone is testy these days”), that doesn’t mean the distracting effects in your brain simply disappear. That nasty encounter can play on repeat in our headspace and skew our equilibrium.

“While small insults and other forms of rude behavior might seem relatively harmless compared to more serious forms of aggression, our findings suggest that they can have serious consequences,” Binyamin Cooper, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, has written.

Unfortunately, the distraction to our focus and functioning may add to the........

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