Aggravating circumstances: A status report on rudeness in America

by Steve Farkas

58 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Bruce Cline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aggravating circumstances: A status report on rudeness in America, by Steve Farkas and Jean Johnson, Public Agenda & The Pew CharitableTrusts (2002, 57pp). While reading a book about rudeness in the past couple weeks, I came across a reference to this interesting article. It’s in the public domain and can be Googled and downloaded for free, or you can buy a copy on Amazon or other bookstore sites. Nothing in it was revelatory, but it was nice to see statistics and read anecdotal information about rudeness and incivility. This study was published in 2002, and while it includes a bit of information about attitudes related to the 9/11 attacks, it distinguishes between longer term trends in behavior and those which might have been impacted by a generally recognized increase of civility in the immediate aftermath of that tragedy. This report is the result of a large scale survey that was conducted to examine what Americans then thought about courtesy, manners, rudeness, and respect. There are lots of graphs and tables, so if you’re loathe to read about this topic, you can focus on the numbers alone and figure out the results. SPOILER ALERT: We’re not all that polite to each other, and many feel incivility getting worse.