I think this is what most "culture fit" issues amount to. Attempts at politely declining someone's services. I'd prefer a more harsh/rude/straight/direct "we th

I think this is what most "culture fit" issues amount to. Attempts at politely declining someone's services. I'd prefer a more harsh/rude/straight/direct "we think you're an asshole" but one of the advantages of not giving someone a rational argument is that you don't have to deal with a rebuttal, you can't (rationally) argue against a culture mismatch, but you can argue that your behavior is not that of an "asshole" (or whatever other label can be applied to your undesirable attributes). This results in a "clean" rejection, where the rejected don't have traction for arguing that they'll "change" or "not do that again" when the rejecters simply don't want to deal with them anymore (for whatever their reasons, rational or otherwise). It's certainly not productive from the rejected's perspective, they truly might not know what they did to offend/displease their coworkers, but it can prevent awkward situations. By not including "real" reasons for rejected, your signaling the the rejected that your not interested in conversing about your decision and that your decision is final, regardless of the logic used to reach it (I think all of these are implicit properties when you don't share your logic behind a decision). As an added bonus, the same strategy works when rejecting people in your personal life, so there's also the societal familiarity/subtext that comes along with the generic rejection that can further emphasize the undesirability of continued interaction and the finality of the decision.