As someone who dislikes being handed things, I want to offer a perspective no else seems to have offered: accepting something implies a fundamental agreement to take an action.
First, I do want to acknowledge the germophobe theory that others mentioned above, in that Tony Stark's character was inspired by the real-life madman Howard Hughes. However, since the idea of germophobia has never been pushed much by Marvel (leaving people scratching their heads and asking questions like this), I wanted to offer a more personality-enmeshed explanation for a phenomenon that I understand very well.
Tony Stark is a fundamentally disagreeable person (as am I). Here I'm referencing the scientific psychological personality trait of "Agreeableness" in the Big 6 or "HEXACO" model created by modern psychology to measure individual tendencies compared to a theoretical average.
People who are highly disagreeable tend to be more interested in technology and making things happen in the world than in making themselves likeable. (This makes being a disagreeable woman super disadvantageous in this culture relative to Tony Stark, but I digress.)
What it means to be fundamentally disagreeable is to be deeply suspicious of social proof, decorum, and seemingly manipulative positivity. All of these are red flags to the low-Agreeableness personality who is more inclined to try to discard that information as low-quality data rather than automatically honor it and risk accepting something that isn't ultimately beneficial to the individual or to society.
Accepting an object from someone creates a debt, an obligation to do something with that object.
If someone succeeds at putting something into your hands, now it's your problem. You can solve that problem in many different ways, but if you're hyperfocused (as I usually am, and as Tony Stark always is) on something else, the chances are very high that you will do one of the following:
- Try to hand it back to the person -- super annoying if you're fundamentally disagreeable, because that requires investing emotional energy if you don't want to piss that person off.
- Take action on the object and risk losing momentum -- a real issue for neurodivergents (which, let's be real here, Tony Stark is some version of).
- Put it down and forget about it (making it problem later-you has to solve, potentially amplified by the passage of time).
Due to the expectations of social niceties, most people would never consider simply refusing to accept a proffered item. That seems rude! Well, that is precisely the kind of idea that a fundamentally disagreeable person can easily consider all day long -- which makes us extremely good at finding novel strategic ways to navigate problems that many people will never consider.
From my perspective as a low-Agreeableness person, I often feel put-upon by people handing me things not just because it sets up an expectation that I should do something, but also that I should interrupt whatever I'm doing so as not to appear rude.
To me, there's nothing about the equation of being handed something that obligates me to take it. Don't hand me my tea; I left it on the table for a reason. Don't hand me a flyer; I'm clearly not interested. Don't open a sparkling water I definitely didn't ask for and then stand there expecting me to take it from you indefinitely. In each of these situations I will tell the person to place that object somewhere else. It's not my job to ferry objects around and interrupt what I'm doing just because you took it upon yourself to "be nice".
Is that rude? I disagree :). What's rude to me is the act of pushing a debt on someone, no matter how small, using social decorum as the means to trick me into it.
The personal lens here may seem excessive but it's meant to give more illumination of the thought process and rationalizations of a fairly quirky character with traits many people don't share.
