Unless I've misunderstood, I don't recommend this. When I was a retail clerk, I would make extra effort to fulfil an unusual request for someone who was polite to me, but not for someone who wasn't. You can say "please" and be polite without acting subservient. Asking for something strange seems fine, though.
(I usually think of people who don't treat service workers kindly as low-status--like they desperately would like to have the power to order someone else around without regard for their feelings but have no other avenue to do it. )
Seconded. I'll throw my two anecdotes on the table:
Anecdote 1: I used to work management, and routinely got good results via "please" and "thank you" because I was raised to be polite. Other managers in the same company often got poor results using rude/bullying techniques. That said, I'd estimate that "politeness" was one of the less significant factors to one's success either way.
Anecdote 2: Working retail, I found that people who were especially rude were usually low-status. The exceptions were mid-status people who seemed ...
Recent brainstorming sessions at SIAI (with participants including Anna, Carl, Jasen, Divia, Will, Amy Willey, and Andrew Critch) have started to produce lists of rationality skills that we could potentially try to teach (at Rationality Boot Camp, at Less Wrong meetups, or similar venues). We've also been trying to break those skills down to the 5-second level (step 2) and come up with ideas for exercises that might teach them (step 3) although we haven't actually composed those exercises yet (step 4, where the actual work takes place).
The bulk of this post will mainly go into the comments, which I'll try to keep to the following format: A top-level comment is a major or minor skill to teach; upvote this comment if you think this skill should get priority in teaching. Sub-level comments describe 5-second subskills that go into this skill, and then third-level comments are ideas for exercises which could potentially train that 5-second skill. If anyone actually went to the work of composing a specific exercise people could run through, that would go to the fourth-level of commenting, I guess. For some major practicable arts with a known standard learning format like "Improv" or "Acting", I'll put the exercise at the top and guesses at which skills it might teach below. (And any plain old replies can go at any level.)
I probably won't be able to get to all of what we brainstormed today, so here's a PNG of the Freemind map that I generated during our session.