Fake Kindness as Symbolic Power

A core characteristic of fake kindness is that it is mostly used by dominant agents in social relations that are already asymmetrical. As a strategy, fake kindness only really makes sense for agents who can rely on underlying social or organizational structures to grant power to their words [10, 11]. Imagine a supervisor meeting an employee to inform them they will be transferred to a less desirable position, or a public health officer announcing that efforts at protecting vulnerable populations will be abandoned. In those examples, the discursive situation makes the words spoken highly performative in themselves. In such contexts, the capacity to convince others may not be that important and, hence, the usual rhetorical tricks might not be favoured by the speaker. On the other hand, as we will discuss, the speaker’s reliance on external displays of behavioural kindness can prove an effective tool to deprive hearers from otherwise legitimate responses.
Fake kindness is a tool used by dominant agents to force their counterparts to limit themselves to similar behavioural boundaries: soft-speaking, well mannered, “professional” and courteous. But, precisely because those exchanges are heavily asymmetric, the social effectiveness of civility won’t be fairly shared. The supervisor firing an employee in a calm and courteous way can impose their will, but the employee can’t reply in a calm and courteous voice to state that they will keep their job and expect it to work. In such a hypothetical exchange, the supervisor is using fake kindness as a social trap to impose obedience on the employee. Behavioural deviations (shouting, crying, swearing, etc.) would then be construed as indications that the employee is conflictual, unprofessional, or dysfunctional and further prove the appropriateness of the termination. As such, fake kindness heavily relies on tone-policing [12, 13] and those using it can generally also rely on institutional rules and structures that will enforce tone-policing in disciplinary proceedings.
As such, fake kindness is essentially a way for the speaker to force on their counterparts a passive acceptance of their subordination by limiting the behavioural repertoire available to them [14]. In the same way, excessive displays of fake kindness – where the behavioural component is pushed to quasi-caricatural length while the absence of any teleological good intentions is also made abundantly clear – should be understood as social signalling. They are ethological warnings from the dominant to the subordinate that any behavioural deviations from passive obedience will be harshly sanctioned.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu [15] coined the term symbolic violence to describe how social norms and institutional rules are intertwined in a way that implicitly, but forcefully, constrain individual behaviours within asymmetric social hierarchies. His theory [2, 3, 15] conceives human agents as being socialized to – more or less consciously – integrate such social hierarchies and structure their behaviours accordingly. As such, symbolic violence is both a tool of social discipline and a manifestation of internalized hierarchies.
It is also important to keep in mind that social spaces – or maybe more accurately fields in the Bourdieusian sense [11] – will not all value kindness to the same extent. For example, one expects agents to be kind in education or healthcare settings but don’t have the same expectation when they are involved in business transactions or political activities. In the same way, there are multiple social roles in which the accepted social expectations include a significant level of behavioural kindness. Primary school teachers or nurses [8], for example, are heavily socialized around such expectations.
As some fields value and emphasize kindness to different levels and extents, the symbolic value associated with behavioural kindness will vary accordingly. In Bourdieusian terms, the symbolic capital one can gain from displaying the attributes of behavioural kindness will be field-dependent. A nurse is likely to be able to gain a significant level of symbolic capital by displaying the attributes of behavioural kindness because the institution they work in, and their colleagues will often construe those displays as examples of professionalism. The fictional character of Nurse Ratched, for example, clearly instrumentalizes behavioural kindness as a source of institutional support and power. On the other hand, a foreman working in an industrial setting would likely gain much less symbolic capital using the exact same behaviours.
The elephant in the room that we skirted around so far is the gendered component of fake kindness. Whether kindness itself is gendered is a question we will leave for others to discuss. But we believe that many characteristic displays of behavioural kindness are clearly gendered as feminine. We recognize this has resulted in centuries of gender-based criticism and that at present, certain professions and people who identify as female in high-profile roles are particularly vulnerable to gender-based attacks. Further, we reject the idea that characteristics of behavioural kindness should be viewed as a weakness. However, acting in bad faith is not bound to an agent’s gender. In a society striving for equality, one’s gender or profession should not remove the possibility of a critical inquiry into their behaviour and motivations.
At the individual level, there are well-documented gendered social expectations about the “proper” balance between assertiveness and meekness for people who identify as female. On the one hand, these expectations can result in a significant barrier to achieving gender equality. But on the other, this might create the opportunity for some to strategically use fake kindness to advance their own interests. At the collective level, those gendered norms will, in turn, increase the effectiveness and prevalence of fake kindness in traditionally feminine fields and professions. As with all socially structured behaviours, the interdependence of individual actions and social norms are complex and probabilistic [2, 3, 11]. Therefore, describing behavioural kindness as a gendered expectation says little about the respective way a person who identifies as male and professionally socialized in a feminine field such as nursing or childcare or a person who identifies as female and professionally socialized in a masculine field such as surgery or carpentry, might act.
We also want to stress that affirming, as we do, that fake kindness is a gendered expression of symbolic violence does not imply in any way that symbolic violence in itself is something feminine. The opposite is much more likely. Symbolic violence is a concept dealing with the ways existing power imbalances and rules of dominance are expressed, enforced and maintained. In patriarchal societies like ours, people who identify as female are overall much likelier to be on the receiving end of symbolic violence[16]. The point we are making here is limited to stating that one specific expression of symbolic violence – among others – is intertwined in gendered social norms.