Affability

Dale Carnegie authored the best-selling book How to win Friends and Influence People. The book recommended showing a genuine interest in other people.

Affability is the "quality of being pleasantly easy to approach and talk to; friendliness or warm politeness".

Affability as a virtue

The Dominican Friars website article The Friendliness Called Affability indicates:

“

It seems a certain nastiness is becoming increasingly common in the way we deal with those who are not our closest friends. From public figures whose words and actions are broadcast on television, to squabbles in comment sections of online posts, to even the face-to-face interactions of social life, we see more and more records of hostility, anger, violence, and vitriol. Our consciences naturally recoil from this vice – as well they should – but what exactly is the virtue that opposes it? In the Summa Theologica, Part II-II, Question 114, St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of a certain virtue which is commonly translated as “the friendliness which is called affability.” This friendliness, he notes, governs relationships between people because “it behooves man to be maintained in a becoming order towards other men as regards their mutual relations with one another, in point of both deeds and words, so that they behave towards one another in a becoming manner.” It does not only govern those relationships which are intimate or proximate; rather “Every man is naturally every man's friend by a certain general love; even so it is written (Ecclesiasticus 13:19) that ‘every beast loveth its like.’” This does not mean that everyone must be treated with equal intimacy – some people are connected to us by a closer bond than others – but that there is a minimum affability or common decency which is owed to all persons.

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See also

• Interpersonal skills

• Conversational skills

External links

• The Friendliness Called Affability, Dominican Friars website
• Affability is a Virtue, Chesterton Academy of the Holy Family