I've asked this question myself, numerous times. According to this piece, so much of this tracks back to the pandemic in combination with other factors like “high-stress, low-reward” situations associated with the loss of jobs, well-being, and tragically, loved ones, in combination with greater drug use and drinking, mental illness and trauma. Fewer services for mental illness and addiction have been costly.
At the most general level, the pandemic itself has impacted societal bonds and established a kind of unsettling, "anomie," or normlessness, as once theorized by sociologist Émile Durkheim whose work pointed to the impacts of rapid social change in society. Check out this incisive quote herein:
"The turn-of-the-20th-century scholar Émile Durkheim called this state anomie, or a lack of social norms that leads to lawlessness. “We are moral beings to the extent that we are social beings,” Durkheim wrote. In the past two years, we have stopped being social, and in many cases we have stopped being moral, too."
I trust that we will have all learned the massively important message of this pandemic that no one is an island and that we all need each other and how that's not only a good thing, but part and parcel to what it means to be human. The good news is that these manifestations of not just "weirdness," but violence, will subside as the pandemic itself subsides. Like you, I hope and pray that we don't have to go through this again as the pandemic's impacts will no doubt reverberate for decades to come.
-Angela Valenzuela
By Olga Khazan | MARCH 30, 2022 | The Atlantic
Everyone is acting so weird! The most obvious recent weirdness was when Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. But if you look closely, people have been behaving badly on smaller stages for months now. Last week, a man was arrested after he punched a gate agent at the Atlanta airport. (The gate agent looked like he was about to punch back, until his female colleague, bless her soul, stood on some chairs and said “no” to the entire situation.) That wasn’t even the only viral asshole-on-a-plane video that week.In February, people found ways to throw tantrums while skiing—skiing. In one viral video, a man slid around the chairlift-boarding area of a Canadian resort, one foot strapped into his snowboard as he flailed at security guards and refused to comply with a mask mandate. Separate footage shows a maskless man on a ski shuttle screaming, “There’s nobody wearing masks on any bus in this goddamn town!” before calling his fellow passenger a “liberal piece of shit” and storming off.
During the pandemic, disorderly, rude, and unhinged conduct seems to have caught on as much as bread baking and Bridgerton. Bad behavior of all kinds —everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence—has increased, as the journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out in a Substack essay earlier this year. Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Early 2021 saw the highest number of “unruly passenger” incidents ever, according to the FAA. In February, a plane bound for Washington, D.C., had to make an emergency landing in Kansas City, Missouri, after a man tried to break into the cockpit.
Health-care workers say their patients are behaving more violently; at one point, Missouri hospitals planned to outfit nurses with panic buttons. Schools, too, are reporting an uptick in “disruptive behavior,” Chalkbeat reported last fall. In 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose by nearly a third, the biggest increase on record, then rose again in 2021. Car thefts spiked 14 percent last year, and carjackings have surged in various cities. And if there were a national tracker of school-board-meeting hissy fits, it would be heaving with data points right now.
What on earth is happening? How did Americans go from clapping for health-care workers to threatening to kill them? More than a dozen experts on crime, psychology, and social norms recently walked me through a few possible explanations.
We’re all stressed out
One likely explanation for the spike in bad behavior is the rage, frustration, and stress coursing through society right now. When Christine Porath, a business professor at Georgetown University, collected data on why people behave in rude or uncivil ways, “the No. 1 reason by far was feeling stressed or overwhelmed,” she told me.
The pandemic has created a lot of “high-stress, low-reward” situations, said Keith Humphreys, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, and now everyone is teetering slightly closer to their breaking point. Someone who may have lost a job, a loved one, or a friend to the pandemic might be pushed over the edge by an innocuous request.
“When someone has that angry feeling, it’s because of a combination of some sort of provocation, their mood at the time of that provocation, and then how they interpret that provocation,” said Ryan Martin, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay who studies anger. Not only are people encountering more “provocations”—staffing shortages, mask mandates—but also their mood is worse when provoked. “Americans don’t really like each other very much right now,” he added.
Rudeness can be contagious. Porath has found that at work, people spread their negative emotions to their colleagues, bosses, and clients—even if those individuals weren’t the source of the negativity. “People who witness rudeness are three times less likely to help someone else,” she told me. She thinks people might be picking up on rudeness from social media and passing it on. Or they might be logging in to a Zoom meeting with their overwhelmed boss, getting yelled at, and then speaking a little more curtly to the grocery cashier later.
