Are people getting ruder? What the data actually says

Complaints that manners are in decline are as old as manners themselves. But a run of recent surveys suggests that many people are not just nostalgic: they report noticing more rudeness in stores, at work and especially online. Here is what the best available data says, what it can’t tell us, and what it implies for how we behave.

In public: half of Americans see a change

In a Pew Research Center survey of 9,609 U.S. adults conducted in November 2024, 47% said people behave more rudely in public now than before the COVID-19 pandemic, including 20% who said “a lot ruder.” Another 44% said behavior is about the same, and 9% said people are more polite.

The same survey found that 34% of Americans almost always or often see people behaving rudely in public, and another 46% sometimes do. Put differently, rudeness is a regular part of public life for most people.

A national “civility problem”

The Civility in America 2019 study by Weber Shandwick, Powell Tate and KRC Research, which surveyed 1,230 U.S. adults plus 100 teens, found that 93% of Americans believe the country has a civility problem and 68% consider it a major one. Respondents who experienced incivility reported an average of 10.2 uncivil encounters per week.

The study also tracked where incivility happens. Between 2013 and 2019, reported uncivil encounters online rose from 4.4 to 5.5 per week, while in-person encounters fell from 5.9 to 4.7. The friction hadn’t disappeared; it had moved onto screens.

Online: where incivility concentrates

In the same 2019 study, 63% of Americans said social media has had a more negative than positive effect on civility; only 9% said more positive. Pew’s research on harassment shows the sharper end of the problem: in a 2020 survey of 10,093 adults, 41% of Americans said they had personally experienced online harassment, and 25% had experienced more severe forms, up from 15% in 2014. Among adults under 30, the share who had been harassed online was 64%.

Our guide to social media etiquette covers how to disagree online without adding to the pile.

At work: the cost of incivility

Workplace researchers have measured rudeness for decades. Christine Porath and Christine Pearson, writing in Harvard Business Review, reported that 98% of the workers they had polled over 14 years had experienced incivility, and that in 2011 half said they were treated rudely at least once a week, up from a quarter in 1998. They also found that about half of people on the receiving end deliberately cut back their work effort.

More recently, SHRM’s Civility Index for the fourth quarter of 2024, based on 1,622 employed U.S. workers, found an average of 1.34 uncivil acts per worker per day. SHRM estimated that added up to more than 222 million uncivil acts a day across the workforce, at a cost to businesses of about $2.7 billion a day.

See our workplace etiquette guide for the everyday habits that keep teams civil.

The good news: courtesy is contagious too

If rudeness spreads, so does its opposite. Research summarized by the Harvard Gazette found that in experiments by Adam Grant and Francesca Gino, 66% of people who had been thanked for help went on to help someone else, compared with 32% of those who hadn’t been thanked. And Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found that people who write gratitude letters underestimate how good the letters make recipients feel and overestimate how awkward recipients will find them.

Both findings point the same way: small courtesies are more powerful, and less risky, than we tend to assume.

What you can do about it

• Go first. Greet the cashier, hold the door, say thank you. Courtesy sets the tone of an interaction more than any rule does.
• Assume good intent once. The person who cut you off may not have seen you. A charitable first reading prevents most escalations.
• Disagree with the idea, not the person. Especially online, where tone is easy to misread.
• Thank people specifically. “Thanks for staying late to finish that” beats a generic “thanks.”
• Pause before posting. If you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, it probably doesn’t belong in a comment thread.
• Don’t pass rudeness along. When someone is rude to you, the courteous move is not to hand it to the next person, especially someone in a service job.
• Know your neighbors. It is much harder to be uncivil with someone whose name you know; see our neighbor etiquette guide.

For practical wording in tense moments, see our guide to courteous phrases for both sides of the counter.