I know too many people with the aforementioned approach. The line of reasoning goes like this:

* Only you are responsible for how you react to events in your life

* This implies that I'm not responsible for how you react to events in your life

* Therefore, I'm not responsible for how I interact in events in your life

* Consequently, I can speak to you unkindly or abusively and it's your responsibility to deal with your reactions.

It's my personal belief that this stems from a deranged form of stoicism because the same people exhibit toxic emotional detachment of their own subjective experience, but that's just a wild headcannon in order to rationalize what is a real collection of disturbing behaviors.

I wasn’t trying to be snarky or unkind. The key to the sentence is the first bit around absence of evidence. If we can’t evaluate whether some action has an effect, then quite possibly it has no effect. That’s all I meant.

With regards to evidence, in my lifetime experience to date (limited and what-not), there seems to be minimal correlation in this regard. Some people are mean even if I am nice to them and some people are nice even if I am mean to them. The correlation seems to be no better than a coin toss. Is that just my experience? Possibly. Anecdotal then? Absolutely. Is it equivalent to a social science experiment that assumes the conclusion? Certainly. I would say it’s better if I look objectively at data collected over the decades.