Pandemic Lockdowns Made the World Ruder
The new, coarser world will likely be with us for years to come.
If the world seems to you a little nastier and more confrontational than it was just a few years ago, you're not alone. Many Americans say the world is a ruder place than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic and the public health responses that closed too many businesses and schools, effectively confined some to their homes, and isolated large numbers of people. Unfortunately, both current evidence and history suggest we may be stuck with a coarser world for years to come.
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Half of Americans Say People are Ruder Since COVID
"Nearly half of U.S. adults (47%) say the way people behave in public these days is ruder than before the COVID-19 pandemic," Pew Research reported last week. "That includes 20% who say behavior today is a lot ruder." A slightly lower number—44 percent—said that behavior is about the same, while 9 percent actually claim that "people are behaving a lot or a little more politely in public."
We already knew that violent crime—murders, in particular—surged during the height of pandemic disruptions. Thankfully, that violent spike appears to have receded, but Americans perceive the world to be a little nastier than in the past, and the people meaner. Pew adds that "a third of adults (34%) say they almost always or often see people behaving rudely when they go out in public these days."
One place that appears is on the roads. According to Australian researchers in 2022, one-third of drivers admitted to being more aggressive now than they were before the pandemic. Sixty-one percent said other drivers were more aggressive. "Almost half the sample (47%) reported that other drivers had become riskier and more dangerous during, and soon after, the COVID-19 lockdowns."
When surveyed last November, roughly half of Americans agreed that "people in their community are driving less safely compared with five years ago." Only 9 percent thought the roads had become safer.
This isn't unprecedented. It's a pattern that's been seen over and over again in the wake of public-health emergencies and the authoritarian restrictions imposed on people's behavior in response.
"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: How Societies Recover from Pandemics. "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.
Almost Half of Parents Report Delayed Social Skills in Their Kids
According to Gallup polling, also released last week, "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."
That means the social lubrication of manners and experience with polite human interaction takes a serious ding. But many kids also have a reduced ability to cope with the stress and strain of simply dealing with life. "Similarly, 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.
If new and coarser social habits were established by social disruptions, and many younger people never learned what normal interpersonal relations were like before the era of COVID-19 and lockdowns, of course the effects may be hard to reverse.
Looking at one of the better-documented public health emergencies of relatively modern times—the 1918 influenza outbreak—Jenkins found not-so-encouraging signs for the future.
Decades of Social Damage From Each Pandemic
"Recent research suggests that the 1918 flu had broad and long-lasting societal impacts," Jenkins noted in his book. "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." That squares with data he found from earlier plagues. "It is in line with previous research on the Black Death and the nineteenth-century cholera epidemics, which also inflicted long-lasting damage on personal trust, damage that affected following generations."
New norms are passed on to children by those whose behavior changed during pandemics and the policies that were imposed by authorities. That becomes the new normal, which can last for decades.
True, not everybody was negatively impacted to a serious degree by COVID-19 and intrusive public health policies. Some places didn't impose much in the way of restrictions, and those that existed were widely ignored in others. Many families quickly adapted to new circumstances and prevented long-term harm for their kids. And some people are just remarkably resilient.
But it's clear that the behavior of a good many people changed for the worse, maybe permanently, during the pandemic. And many children were delayed in learning social skills and suffered lingering mental health problems. It's not necessary for all members of a society, or even a majority, to change their ways for that society to undergo a transformation. History suggests the effects will last a long time.
In March 2020, while governments flexed their public health policy muscles in deeply intrusive ways, I warned that pandemic-related unemployment and shutdowns are a recipe for social unrest. Shortly before, David L. Katz, former director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, had written in The New York Times that he was "deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life—schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned—will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself."
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.
