Are People Ruder Today Than Before the Pandemic?

"That includes 20% who say behavior today is a lot ruder." A somewhat lower number, 44%, think that Americans are about the same, while 9 percent actually claim that "people are behaving a lot or a little more politely in public."

Pew reports that "a third of adults (34%) say they almost always or often see people behaving rudely when they go out in public these days."

Despite anecdotal evidence that you might have, I'm not sure this is necessarily true, at least for those who claim that people are "a lot" ruder than they were before the pandemic. It also depends on where you live and what you're doing. Are New York City and Chicago drivers any more aggressive than before the pandemic? I haven't noticed. Drivers, in general, may be more aggressive, but how do you quantify that for a study of American attitudes and moods?

"Epidemics also contribute to a coarsening of society," security expert and RAND Corporation adviser Brian Michael Jenkins wrote in his 2022 book "Plagues and Their Aftermath." 

"Civility has been declining for decades for a variety of reasons, and the pandemic has added new layers of edginess… There is not just a loss of comity, but an increase in aggression." 

According to Jenkins, "the observed increase in antisocial behavior" can be blamed on "prolonged isolation, which heightens anxiety, increases irritability, promotes aggression, and diminishes impulse control." Unfortunately, he adds, "the effects may be hard to reverse."

Why are the effects hard to reverse? Well, a lot of trust in institutions is lost. "Suspicion of government is a recurring theme," Jenkins notes after serious civil liberties violations, mandated disruptions of normal activity, and extensions of state power into unprecedented areas where such intrusions are unwelcome and resented. But isolation and closures also breed new social habits as people adapt to a more insular world—and prevent people still learning their way in society from experiencing normal interactions.

Without a doubt, manners and politeness have been lost in recent generations. These are habits that must be taught by parents and reinforced in schools. The resulting loss of socially lubricating manners may mean it will be decades before civility is regained.  

A recent Gallup poll found "45% of parents of school-age children say the pandemic has had a negative impact on their child's social skills development. Half of them, 22%, report the social difficulty is ongoing." 

Another 42% of these parents say "their child's mental health has been negatively affected by the pandemic, including 21% who say the issue persists," according to Gallup.

"The social disruption caused by the 1918 flu significantly eroded people's trust and – the most fascinating finding – this lack of trust was inherited by descendants," writes Jenkins.

The rudeness and aggressiveness became a "new normal" that moved seamlessly into society.

Rudeness isn't murder or even crime, it's not the impoverishment we've seen from lockdowns, and it isn't as pernicious as the loss of freedom inflicted in the name of health. But it appears that in the course of screwing with our lives and our livelihoods and undermining their own credibility, the powers-that-be also managed to disrupt our relations with our neighbors. The world in which we live isn't just a little poorer, more distrustful, and less free than it was before governments went on a COVID-fueled power trip—it's also ruder.

Maybe it's because we notice more rudeness in our neighbors than we used to. Perhaps the pandemic has heightened our awareness of how others treat us.

So many poll respondents today answer questions the way they think a pollster wants them to, and it becomes hard to trust the results of most polls. Outside of drivers driving more aggressively, I don't see the "rudeness" described in the survey.