Why are so many people behaving badly? 5 Things podcast

On a special episode of the 5 Things podcast: People misbehaving in public is on the rise. Whether they're throwing tantrums or they're throwing drinks, it seems that there’s at least one such viral incident every day. When did we unlearn how to be civil to one another? And more importantly, what can we as a society do to fix it? Author Kirsty Sedgman, a cultural studies scholar at the University of Bristol, joins 5 Things to unpack this disturbing trend.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to 5 Things. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, September 13th, 2023, and this is a special episode of 5 Things. Bad behavior in public, on airplanes and theaters, at restaurants, is on the rise. It seems that there's at least one such incident plastered all over social media every day. Has this phenomenon gotten worse since Covid? When did we unlearn how to be civil to one another? And more importantly, what can we do as a society to fix it? I'm joined today by author Kirsty Sedgman, a cultural studies scholar based at the University of Bristol. She also, most recently, is the author of On Being Unreasonable, a book that attempts to answer these questions. Kirsty, thank you for joining me.

Kirsty Sedgman:

Thanks you so much for having me.

Dana Taylor:

So let's start with the evidence, public displays of people becoming unhinged proliferate on social media. My sense in seeing these videos is that this behavior has gotten worse since Covid, that somehow being separated from each other during lockdown made us forget how to behave when we're together. Do you agree with that?

Kirsty Sedgman:

If you'd asked me that question before Covid, I would've said that honestly, we've been having these debates about whether or not people are getting increasingly badly behaved for, well, over 2000 years, as far back as Plato, who was also to be found complaining about how people who used to be respectful of others suddenly felt that they could use their tongues and say whatever they liked, particularly in communal spaces like theaters, and used to at least be controlled with a stick. And so in one sense, this is nothing new. But, I work with a range of cultural organizations and there seems to be a pervasive sense that since Covid things have changed remarkably for the worst.

Dana Taylor:

Are these incidents more prevalent amongst Americans or Europeans also wrestling with this issue? I'm thinking about the recent incident at the Eiffel Tower where two drunk Americans spent the night. What's your sense on that?

Kirsty Sedgman:

Well, I'm in the UK and the pervading sense from a lot of people that I speak with seems to be that it's absolutely not just a US problem, that it's happening here in the UK and throughout Europe. That the, what we often call the social contract, that series of behavioral norms that help us to moderate our behavior for the good of everybody, encouraging pro-social behavior and discouraging anti-social forms of behavior, that social contract is to some extent collapsing around us.

Dana Taylor:

So what I'm calling unhinged here is a direct confrontation that challenges our understanding of what's acceptable behavior and what's not. In your book, On Being Unreasonable, you say that it's crucial to understand who created those rules and who benefits most from them. Why is that?

Kirsty Sedgman:

So I started researching this in relation to audiences specifically just to start to unravel that really big social problem about the rules of behavior in everyday life. The fact that on the one hand, absolutely we need to have rules, we need to be able to draw lines between acceptable and unacceptable, appropriate and inappropriate, reasonable and unreasonable, without the ability to draw those lines society absolutely would collapse. There would be no such thing as civilization at all. But we also, I think, need to think really carefully and critically about where those behavioral norms came from in the first place and who they benefit and who is excluded or even harmed when those perhaps too strict rules are weaponized. And that's what I found in theaters. But also if there's one thing that studying audiences has shown me, it's that live performance has always been a kind of canary in the coal mine because these are spaces where societal tensions and frustrations start to erupt first of all.

And I think now that's what we're seeing absolutely spilling out into every aspect of social life, but particularly in our neighborhoods. What I'm really interested in is those moments where instances of what we might call collective effervescence, which is moments where communities can come together in public spaces like parks and engage in collective acts of fun, like having barbecues together, maybe playing music, and what I realized when I started researching this book is how many of those spaces have become increasingly public spaces really only in name. And I can see that myself in my very own city, how many supposedly communal spaces are actually privately owned with particular rules about who is allowed to go there and whether or not children say are allowed to play ball games in those areas, and particularly crackdowns against skateboarders and young people congregating. But we need these spaces as communities for that form of collective effervescence from exuberant communal joy, because otherwise the bonds that are holding us together can fragment. And I think that's what we're seeing now today.

Dana Taylor:

Author David Brooks recently had an article in The Atlantic entitled How America Got Mean, where he suggests that society has neglected to teach morality as a fundamental cornerstone of our education system. The collapse of the church is another factor. What's your response to this?

Kirsty Sedgman:

In a world that is increasingly obsessed with images, we've risked confusing the appearance of reasonableness, things like dapper clothing and calm, polite voices with true moral reasonableness. But I don't necessarily think that as societies we're necessarily meaner today than we've ever been before, but I do think that we need to wrestle really urgently with the fact that that social contract is fragmenting because we are being deliberately incentivized into individualistic rather than communitarian modes of thinking.

Dana Taylor:

It's no secret that there's a growing mental health crisis across America. Do we all just need more counseling to learn how to deal with adversity?

Kirsty Sedgman:

I think that we really do need to acknowledge the fact that we've been living through a mass trauma event. We haven't been given the necessary space or facilities to process that trauma collectively. And I do also know that obviously the post Covid studies are still emerging to tell us what their psychological, but also the physiological, effect of living through this time has been on us. But I think it's really important not that we condone people who are acting out now, but that we work to understand it. And I think it's too simplistic to say, "Oh, it's just because we've forgotten how to be together during that time." I don't think that's the case at all.

But I do wrangle in the book with the psychological impact of seeing people in power basically breaking the rules and getting away with it with impunity and essentially doing whatever they liked and how that might make some people think, well, if they're not going to bother then why should anybody tell me what to do? I often call it there's this growing sense of belligerence of don't tell me what to do-itis. And again, that's not to condone it, but I think it's really important that we understand it.

Dana Taylor:

Well, journalist Matthew Iglesias has also written on the topic. His theory is that average behavior has been shifting to the more disruptive end of the spectrum since Covid, and it's that shift that creates an underlying tolerance for more quote outlier behavior. What are your thoughts there?

Kirsty Sedgman:

That's a really interesting question. I believe that by and large we're social animals and that we act selfishly not because we can't help ourselves, we become selfish when that's made to seem the acceptable, even the desirable thing to do. I've got a quote, "The tectonic plates of normative behavior are beginning inexorably to shift when we're made to feel like other people are pushing the boundaries and benefiting." So I think that it's really important that we develop healthy communicative mechanisms even to have these conversations because if we truly believe that we're living in a democratic society, then we have to get back onto that same page to develop that shared system of both formal rules and informal guidelines. That social contract that we can all believe is keeping society and social life better and safer and making it fairer for everybody. I believe that we have the capacity to come back together again, but we need to fight that disconnection economy that is deliberately trying to tear us apart.

Dana Taylor:

Kirsty, is behaving badly contagious?

Kirsty Sedgman:

Yes and no. So one of the things that I look at in the book is that contagion theory of influence, and there are signs that show that if we see other people acting out, then it's more likely that as that social contract gets stretched, we might accordingly take up similar kinds of positions, even if we know that that's acting out of term. But it's not as simple as saying that we are just animals led by our baser instincts. We're herd creatures, and if one person panics, then everybody will. Because the idea that crowds are more likely to behave badly together, that madness of crowds, which was the original social contagion theory, is actually counterbalanced with the theory that actually when gathered together people collectively are smarter and less irrational and more likely to make better decisions than by themselves. That's the wisdom of crowds theory. So the reality is that we are social creatures, we are led by our peers and influenced by each other, but also we have a tremendous agenetic capacity to decide how we want to behave.

Dana Taylor:

And finally, we're also more divided than ever, politically, economically, geographically, and that obviously impacts compromise. It hampers social negotiation when the opposing side is seen as unreasonable. How do we see others as more human? Do we need to teach compassion again?

Kirsty Sedgman:

Compassion is a lovely word. I like it a whole lot better than those more problematic terms like civility, which have been weaponized to both good and bad. I just don't think there can be anything bad at all about teaching compassion for other people. But actually it's really the oldest lesson there is, judge not lest ye be judged, which is not to say that we shouldn't ever judge or shame other people. In fact, if we see somebody behaving in a way that is aggressive or unsafe or bigoted, then perhaps we do have that moral responsibility to stand up and to say something right there and then. Shame can be a really good and productive thing. But on the other hand, we know that that desire to make everybody behave and see the world exactly like us has caused centuries of divisions. So we just need to think really carefully and critically when we are judging other people before leaping to judgment too soon in a way that might actively be harmful because perhaps we haven't necessarily interrogated whether our biases or belief systems are reasonable at all.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks so much for your time here, Kirsty.

Kirsty Sedgman:

Thank you so much for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to Cherie Saunders for production assistance. Our senior producer is Shannon Rae Green, and our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of 5 Things.