Our main goal is to determine if human summarizers include the politeness degree of dialogues in their summaries. We describe two empirical pilot studies on the role of politeness in dialogue summarization. We intend to use the results to build an automatic dialogue summarization system. Amongst other things, we found that the politeness degree is included more often in summaries of dialogues which deviate from what would be considered normal or unmarked. The extent to which politeness degree is included does, however, seem to be affected by constraints on the summary length. We found that the point of view of the summarizer does not influence the extent to which politeness is reported in the summaries.