The Contempt Economy: Whatever Happened to Our Social Brakes?
Just because you've got something to say doesn't mean the rest of us need to fucking hear it.
That used to be a fairly ordinary understanding of how people behaved around one another.
You had a thought.
You considered whether it was appropriate.
And sometimes, you decided to keep it to yourself.
Not because you were frightened of offending somebody.
Not because you lacked confidence.
And certainly not because you were oppressed by some imaginary army of politically correct do-gooders.
Because you possessed something rather useful.
Restraint.
The ability to recognise that your immediate feelings, frustrations, opinions and desires weren't automatically more important than the experiences of the people around you.
And increasingly, I wonder whether we're losing it.
I see people becoming disproportionately angry over minor inconveniences.
People reacting to disagreements as though they've been personally attacked.
People making unnecessarily cruel remarks because they've spotted an opportunity to get a laugh.
People behaving in shared spaces as though nobody else exists.
And people responding to perfectly reasonable requests with levels of hostility that seem completely detached from the circumstances.
None of this is new.
People have always been capable of behaving like complete arseholes.
I know that.
I've spent enough time working with the general public, managing people, running businesses and observing everyday life to understand that inconsiderate behaviour wasn't invented by Facebook.
But I do wonder whether something has changed in the relationship between what people feel and what they consider acceptable to express.
Because there's a difference between experiencing frustration and deciding that everyone else should experience it with you.
There's a difference between thinking something unkind and choosing to say it.
And there's a difference between having an opinion and believing you're entitled to impose it on everybody within earshot.
What concerns me isn't simply the hostility. It's the apparent disappearance of the moment in which somebody might previously have decided not to express it.
And I think that moment deserves considerably more attention.
The strange generosity of a Devon country lane
I spend a fair amount of time in South Devon.
If you've ever driven around that part of the country, you'll know that some of the roads are barely wide enough for one vehicle, let alone two heading towards each other.
Stone walls.
High hedges.
Blind bends.
Passing places that appear precisely where you don't need them and mysteriously disappear when you do.
During the summer, when the roads are full of visitors, you could be forgiven for assuming the entire experience would become an exercise in frustration.
And occasionally, it does.
But something happens on those roads that I find surprisingly reassuring.
Two cars approach each other.
There's not enough room to pass.
Both drivers recognise the problem.
And almost immediately, somebody starts reversing.
Sometimes both drivers start reversing.
I've found myself reversing towards a passing place while watching the car in front do exactly the same thing.
It's almost comical.
Two complete strangers competing to be the more considerate driver.
Neither knows the other.
Neither is getting paid.
Neither has an audience.
Nobody's filming it.
Nobody's going to receive five hundred likes for being a decent human being.
They're simply recognising that a minor inconvenience is best resolved through a little cooperation.
And I fucking love that.
Because it reminds me that consideration hasn't disappeared.
Most people are still perfectly capable of recognising that other people have needs, priorities and places to be.
They can accommodate one another.
They can make small sacrifices.
They can choose cooperation over confrontation.
And they can do it without anybody telling them to.
Now compare that with the reactions you sometimes witness in other everyday situations.
Someone takes a little too long at a supermarket checkout.
Someone hesitates at a junction.
Someone asks another passenger to move a bag from an occupied train seat.
Someone politely requests that a video be played through headphones rather than broadcast to an entire carriage.
Ordinary interactions.
Minor inconveniences.
Problems that could generally be resolved in seconds.
Yet some people react as though they've suffered an extraordinary injustice.
And that contrast fascinates me.
Because we're dealing with the same basic requirement.
One person needs to recognise the existence of another.
The difference is how willing they are to accommodate them.
The space between feeling and acting
I think most people experience considerably more unkind thoughts than they're comfortable admitting.
I certainly do.
Someone cuts me up in traffic.
Someone behaves inconsiderately.
Someone says something spectacularly stupid.
Sometimes my internal response isn't particularly polite.
Occasionally, it's not even remotely printable.
But there's a difference between what happens inside my head and what I choose to do next.
I might think somebody is a complete fucking idiot.
That doesn't mean I need to tell them.
I might find somebody's behaviour irritating.
That doesn't automatically mean I need to confront them.
And I might think of a particularly cutting response during an argument.
That doesn't mean delivering it would improve the situation.
Quite often, it would make things worse.
There's a mental process involved.
You experience something.
You interpret it.
You feel an emotional response.
And somewhere between that response and your next action, you exercise judgement.
Is this worth challenging?
Have I understood what's happening?
Will what I'm about to say help?
Am I responding to the situation or simply satisfying my own frustration?
Do I genuinely need to say anything?
That process can happen in a fraction of a second.
Most of the time, we're barely conscious of it.
But it serves an important social purpose.
It allows people with different personalities, priorities, beliefs and emotional states to coexist without every minor inconvenience becoming a confrontation.
And I wonder whether the digital environments we've constructed are gradually influencing how readily some people engage that process.
Not because social media invented anger.
Not because everybody who watches provocative content becomes less considerate.
But because we've created an extraordinary amount of entertainment around people doing precisely the opposite of exercising restraint.
The insult that shouldn't have been delivered.
The reaction that should have been controlled.
The confrontation that didn't need to happen.
The private embarrassment turned into a public spectacle.
And we reward those moments with attention.
Then we wonder why some people appear increasingly comfortable behaving in similar ways themselves.
When rudeness becomes contagious
There's a piece of research that I think deserves particular attention.
In 2016, Trevor Foulk, Andrew Woolum and Amir Erez published a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology examining how rudeness spreads through workplaces.
Across three studies, they investigated whether exposure to relatively low-intensity negative behaviour could influence how people subsequently behaved towards others.
Their findings were fascinating.
Experiencing rudeness could influence how people interpreted later interactions.
And that altered interpretation could contribute to hostile behaviour towards somebody who hadn't been involved in the original unpleasant encounter.
In other words, somebody could experience an unnecessarily rude interaction and subsequently behave more negatively towards another person.
The behaviour didn't necessarily stay confined to the original relationship.
It could spread.
And the researchers identified a cognitive mechanism that helped explain why.
Exposure to rudeness could activate related concepts in people's minds, making them more likely to interpret ambiguous behaviour negatively.
Think about that.
Somebody is rude to you.
You become more sensitive to rudeness.
Another person says something that could be interpreted in several ways.
You interpret it as hostile.
And your response becomes more hostile as a result.
Now, this research examined interpersonal behaviour in organisational settings.
It doesn't establish that watching offensive comedy on Facebook produces the same effects.
But I think the underlying mechanism raises a remarkable question.
If a single unpleasant interaction can influence how somebody interprets and responds to subsequent interactions, what might happen when people encounter repeated examples of hostility throughout their day?
It's not difficult to imagine how the process could operate.
You open your phone.
You watch an argument.
You read a particularly unpleasant exchange.
You see somebody publicly mocked.
You scroll through a comment section full of people attacking one another.
Then you put your phone down and return to the physical world.
Perhaps somebody says something slightly irritating.
Perhaps another driver makes a mistake.
Perhaps a colleague sends an email that could be interpreted as unnecessarily abrupt.
Could the environment you've just been immersed in affect how you interpret that interaction?
Could you become more inclined to perceive hostility where none was intended?
Or respond more aggressively than the circumstances genuinely warrant?
I don't know precisely how often that happens.
And I don't intend to pretend that workplace rudeness experiments prove a direct causal relationship between social media consumption and offline aggression.
But I think it's a possibility that deserves investigation.
Because the influence wouldn't necessarily require somebody to consciously imitate anything.
It could operate through the way they interpret the behaviour of people around them.
And that would make the consequences considerably harder to recognise.
The world looks different when you're expecting an argument
Imagine arriving at work after an unpleasant journey.
Someone cut you up.
Another driver shouted at you.
You spent twenty minutes crawling through traffic.
Then you opened your phone and watched somebody having an argument about something entirely inconsequential.
You're already irritated.
Now a colleague asks whether you've finished a particular piece of work.
Perfectly reasonable question.
But you hear criticism.
You interpret the request as pressure.
You respond defensively.
Your colleague now feels that you've been unnecessarily abrupt.
And perhaps they become a little less patient with the next person.
Nothing particularly dramatic has happened.
Nobody's committed a crime.
Nobody's made a formal complaint.
But several people's experiences have become slightly more unpleasant.
And I wonder how much everyday hostility operates through these kinds of interactions.
Not through people deliberately deciding to become more aggressive.
But through frustration, expectation and the cumulative influence of what they've experienced throughout the day.
In 2017, Andrew Woolum and colleagues published further research examining how witnessing rudeness in the morning could influence people's perceptions and behaviour throughout the working day.
The research reinforced the possibility that relatively minor unpleasant experiences can have consequences beyond the immediate interaction.
That's significant.
Because when we discuss hostility, we often focus on the most dramatic examples.
The assault.
The screaming argument.
The public humiliation.
The abusive social media campaign.
But perhaps a considerable amount of the damage begins with something much smaller.
A person becomes irritated.
They respond unnecessarily sharply.
Another person becomes defensive.
Someone else interprets that defensiveness as aggression.
And the interaction escalates.
I suspect that some of the hostility we encounter in everyday life may be the result of people arriving at ordinary situations already primed to expect something unpleasant.
And if that's happening, the problem isn't simply what people are saying.
It's the emotional environment they're carrying into the interaction.
The internet gave us permission to behave differently
Back in 2004, psychologist John Suler published a paper exploring what he called the online disinhibition effect.
He examined why people sometimes behave differently online than they would in face-to-face interactions.
Among the factors he identified were anonymity, invisibility, delayed communication and reduced perceptions of authority.
The basic principle is familiar.
Some people become more comfortable expressing things online that they might hesitate to say in person.
Sometimes that's positive.
People can become more open.
More honest.
More willing to discuss difficult experiences.
The distance created by the screen can help them express feelings they might otherwise conceal.
But it can also work in the opposite direction.
People can become more aggressive.
More confrontational.
Less inhibited about delivering insults.
And less concerned about the immediate reactions of the people they're addressing.
Now, there's an important distinction here.
Suler wasn't arguing that everybody reveals their true personality online.
Nor does the existence of online disinhibition prove that those behaviours inevitably transfer into the physical world.
But it raises something interesting when we consider how much time people now spend communicating in digital environments.
What happens when somebody becomes accustomed to a particular style of interaction?
When they repeatedly express frustration without having to confront another person's emotional response?
When they become familiar with delivering sharp, dismissive or humiliating remarks and receiving approval from an audience?
And when they begin interacting with the physical world after spending substantial portions of their day in that environment?
Perhaps they maintain a perfectly clear distinction.
Many people do.
But I wonder whether others begin importing some of those habits into ordinary conversations.
Not because they've forgotten that real people exist.
But because particular styles of communication have become increasingly normal to them.
And that's a much more complicated question than whether social media makes people aggressive.
It's about whether repeated behaviour in one environment can begin influencing expectations and habits in another.
The social rules didn't disappear. We stopped noticing them.
Consider the unspoken expectations that make ordinary life reasonably pleasant.
You hold the door for somebody who's directly behind you.
You don't push in front of people who've been waiting longer than you.
You don't play your music at full volume in a shared space.
You don't interrupt a conversation simply because you've decided that whatever you're about to say is more important.
You don't humiliate somebody for making a perfectly ordinary mistake.
You don't treat people serving you as though their only purpose is to absorb your frustration.
None of these things requires an extraordinary amount of intelligence.
They don't require formal training.
And they certainly don't require a degree in psychology.
They require awareness.
The ability to recognise that other people exist independently of your immediate priorities.
Yet I increasingly encounter situations where that awareness appears to be missing.
I've sat on trains where people are watching videos aloud as though the entire carriage has agreed to participate.
I've seen people leave bags on seats while other passengers struggle to find somewhere to sit.
I've watched perfectly ordinary requests become unnecessarily confrontational because somebody seems to interpret being asked to show consideration as a personal insult.
And I find myself wondering what has changed.
Because the requests themselves aren't unreasonable.
Move your bag.
Turn the volume down.
Wait your turn.
Give somebody a little space.
These are hardly oppressive demands.
They're simply the small compromises that make shared environments function.
But perhaps that's where the problem lies.
We've become increasingly accustomed to environments designed around our individual preferences, while the physical world still requires us to accommodate other people.
And those two experiences don't always sit comfortably together.
When the world doesn't respond to your preferences
Think about the convenience we've gradually built into modern life.
Entertainment whenever we want it.
Food delivered to our door.
Shopping without leaving the house.
Instant access to information.
Personalised recommendations.
Services designed to minimise inconvenience.
Technology has made extraordinary improvements to our lives.
I'm not remotely opposed to that.
I use it constantly.
And I have no intention of pretending that the world was somehow better when everything required more time and effort.
But I do wonder whether the cumulative experience of convenience influences our expectations.
Because the physical world doesn't work like an app.
The person in front of you at the checkout doesn't disappear because you're impatient.
The driver approaching on a narrow road doesn't magically move aside because you're in a hurry.
The person sitting next to you on a train doesn't stop existing because you'd prefer to occupy both seats.
And the other people in a restaurant aren't obliged to listen to whatever you've decided to watch on your phone.
Living alongside other people involves friction.
Compromise.
Delay.
Disagreement.
Occasionally, a little inconvenience.
And perhaps we've become increasingly uncomfortable with those things.
Not necessarily because technology has made us selfish.
That's too simplistic.
But because we've become accustomed to so many parts of our lives responding immediately to our preferences.
And when other people don't respond in the same way, the frustration can become disproportionately intense.
I think that's a relationship worth investigating.
Especially when you combine it with the relentless exposure to confrontation and instant gratification that characterises so much digital entertainment.
Perhaps we're not only becoming more comfortable expressing frustration.
Perhaps we're also becoming less comfortable experiencing it without immediately doing something about it.
And those are potentially two sides of the same problem.
Being in a hurry changes how we treat people
There's a classic psychological experiment that I've always found fascinating.
In 1973, John Darley and Daniel Batson conducted research involving students at Princeton Theological Seminary.
The participants were asked to travel between buildings to deliver a talk.
Some were told they had plenty of time.
Others were told they were running late.
Along the way, they encountered somebody apparently in distress.
The researchers wanted to understand what influenced the students' willingness to stop and help.
The results were striking.
Among participants who weren't in a hurry, approximately 63% offered help.
Among those under substantial time pressure, that figure fell to around 10%.
The study involved only forty participants, so we shouldn't treat those percentages as universal measures of human behaviour.
But the difference was substantial.
And here's the part I find especially interesting.
Some of the participants were preparing to speak about the parable of the Good Samaritan.
They were literally thinking about helping other people.
Yet being in a hurry influenced whether they stopped.
That's extraordinary.
Not because it reveals that people are inherently selfish.
But because it demonstrates how the circumstances surrounding an interaction can influence whether somebody acts in accordance with their values.
You can believe kindness is important.
You can consider yourself a considerate person.
You can understand perfectly well that somebody needs help.
And still fail to act because something else has captured your immediate attention.
Now consider the modern environment.
We're constantly being encouraged to do things more quickly.
Respond immediately.
Move faster.
Consume more.
Keep up.
Don't miss out.
Get to the next thing.
And at the same time, we're repeatedly exposed to examples of people reacting impatiently, expressing frustration and confronting others.
I wonder whether those influences can combine in ways that make consideration less likely.
Not necessarily because people have become morally worse.
But because they're more distracted, more rushed, more frustrated and perhaps less willing to tolerate interruption.
There's a distinction there that matters.
You don't have to stop caring about other people to start behaving as though they're getting in your way.
Sometimes you simply become so focused on your own immediate priorities that you stop recognising theirs.
And perhaps the modern attention economy is contributing to that problem in ways we haven't adequately considered.
The hostility is measurable. Just not all of it.
I know some people will dismiss observations like these as nostalgia.
Every generation believes manners are declining.
Every generation complains that young people have less respect.
Every generation remembers a supposedly more considerate past.
And there's some truth in that criticism.
Human memory is selective.
We romanticise previous experiences.
We become more sensitive to particular behaviours as we get older.
And our own expectations change.
I don't believe the past was some extraordinary golden age of politeness.
It wasn't.
But neither do I think it's reasonable to dismiss genuine concerns about changes in behaviour simply because people have complained about declining standards before.
Some forms of hostility are measurable.
In February 2026, the British Retail Consortium published figures showing approximately 1,600 incidents of violence and abuse against retail workers every day during 2024–25.
That was an improvement on the previous year, when the figure exceeded 2,000.
But it remained dramatically higher than the approximately 455 daily incidents recorded before the pandemic in 2019–20.
Those numbers represent real people.
Shop assistants.
Cashiers.
Supervisors.
People trying to do their jobs.
In September 2026, the Office of Rail and Road reported that assaults against passengers and members of the public on Britain's mainline railway had increased by 36% in the latest reporting year.
Reported assaults against railway workers increased by 12%.
Again, real people.
Experiencing real hostility.
In ordinary environments.
Now, these figures don't establish that social media is responsible.
And changes in reporting, enforcement and other circumstances complicate comparisons.
It's also important to recognise that broader measures of violent crime have declined substantially over the longer term.
The picture isn't uniformly worsening.
But I don't think we can dismiss the evidence from particular sectors simply because other indicators have improved.
And perhaps the most important forms of behavioural change aren't captured by crime statistics at all.
The unnecessary insult.
The refusal to show consideration.
The disproportionate reaction.
The casual humiliation.
The increasingly common expectation that other people should simply tolerate your behaviour.
Most of those interactions never appear in official figures.
There's no national database recording the number of people who behaved like inconsiderate dickheads in supermarkets yesterday.
Perhaps there should be.
Although I suspect the people responsible would object to being asked to complete the paperwork.
But the absence of comprehensive measurement doesn't mean the behaviour is inconsequential.
It simply makes the broader pattern more difficult to establish.
And that's where observation becomes particularly valuable.
Not as a substitute for evidence.
But as a way of identifying questions that our existing measurements may not be designed to answer.
Not every hostile response begins with a hostile person
There's another possibility I think we need to consider.
What if some of the behaviour we're witnessing reflects a change in expectations rather than a change in people's underlying personalities?
Imagine somebody who generally considers themselves reasonable.
They work hard.
They care about their family.
They help their friends.
They don't wake up intending to make anybody else's life unpleasant.
But they're exhausted.
Financially stressed.
Under pressure at work.
Constantly interrupted.
And spending hours in digital environments where confrontation, outrage and ridicule are ordinary forms of entertainment.
Now somebody inconveniences them.
Nothing dramatic.
Just a small interruption.
And they react badly.
Perhaps they snap.
Perhaps they deliver an unnecessarily sharp response.
Perhaps they become confrontational.
Does that mean they're fundamentally an unpleasant person?
Not necessarily.
But the person receiving the response still experiences the unpleasantness.
And here's where I think the problem becomes potentially self-reinforcing.
If that person then responds defensively, the original individual may interpret the response as further evidence that everybody is unreasonable.
Their expectations become reinforced.
And the interaction escalates.
We've already examined research suggesting that rudeness can spread through subsequent interactions.
We've also considered how social media can distort perceptions of normal behaviour.
Put those mechanisms alongside the effects of stress, distraction and time pressure, and a broader possibility begins to emerge.
People may be entering ordinary situations already expecting other people to be difficult.
Then interpreting ambiguous behaviour through that expectation.
Then responding in ways that make the situation genuinely more difficult.
And eventually, everybody leaves the interaction believing that other people have become less considerate.
Perhaps both parties are right about the interaction.
But neither has necessarily understood how it developed.
I find that fascinating.
Because it suggests that changes in our perception of society could potentially contribute to changes in how society behaves.
Not through some dramatic collective decision.
But through millions of minor interactions in which people increasingly expect the worst from one another.
The right to speak isn't an obligation to speak
There's something about the modern obsession with unrestricted expression that I find increasingly peculiar.
The belief that because you're entitled to say something, saying it must automatically be worthwhile.
I believe strongly in freedom of expression.
I believe people should be able to challenge ideas.
I believe offensive humour has a legitimate place in society.
And I think the ability to question accepted thinking is essential.
But I don't understand why so many people seem to confuse the freedom to express themselves with the necessity of expressing absolutely everything.
You can disagree with somebody without humiliating them.
You can challenge poor behaviour without becoming abusive.
You can think somebody is an idiot without announcing it to everybody within earshot.
And you can find something funny without automatically deciding that the joke needs sharing.
None of those choices makes you weak.
None requires you to abandon your opinions.
And none means you're surrendering your freedom.
It simply means you're exercising judgement over how you use it.
There's an enormous difference between somebody preventing you from speaking and you deciding that speaking would be unnecessary.
One is a restriction imposed from outside.
The other is control exercised from within.
And I think we've become remarkably poor at distinguishing between the two.
Restraint isn't somebody else controlling what you say.
It's you being capable of controlling yourself.
That distinction matters.
Especially when people increasingly interpret even mild objections to their behaviour as attempts to silence them.
Sometimes nobody is trying to silence you.
They're simply asking you to stop being unnecessarily unpleasant.
And that's not quite the same thing.
But restraint can become an excuse for avoiding conflict
There's a complication here that I don't want to ignore.
Because I don't believe restraint is automatically a virtue.
Sometimes remaining silent is exactly the wrong decision.
Sometimes somebody needs challenging.
Sometimes a person being mistreated needs someone else to step in.
Sometimes an uncomfortable conversation has to happen.
And sometimes refusing to speak isn't evidence of maturity.
It's avoidance.
I've spent enough of my life absorbing other people's problems and tolerating situations I should have challenged to understand that distinction.
Being endlessly accommodating can become its own form of dysfunction.
You can convince yourself you're being reasonable when you're actually allowing somebody else's poor behaviour to continue.
You can frame silence as professionalism when you're really trying to avoid confrontation.
And you can confuse self-control with simply putting up with too much.
That's not what I'm advocating.
I don't want people becoming passive.
I don't want people tolerating abuse.
And I certainly don't want children growing up believing that being considerate means allowing others to walk all over them.
Quite the opposite.
I think genuine restraint involves recognising when action is necessary and when it's simply emotionally satisfying.
Sometimes the correct response is to speak.
Firmly.
Clearly.
Without apology.
But sometimes the correct response is to recognise that the situation doesn't require your intervention.
The important thing is making that distinction deliberately.
Not reacting simply because you're angry.
Not staying silent simply because you're frightened.
Choosing the response that best serves the situation rather than the one that provides the quickest emotional relief.
And that requires a degree of self-awareness that I suspect becomes increasingly difficult when we've spent years consuming entertainment built around immediate reactions.
Because the internet rarely rewards the person who considers an insult and decides not to deliver it.
There's no viral clip of the argument that never happened.
No audience applauding the person who recognised that a stranger was having a bad day and decided to give them a little space.
No engagement metrics attached to an unnecessarily cruel comment that somebody chose not to publish.
And perhaps that's one of the most important things we're missing.
The behaviours that keep society functioning are frequently invisible.
While the behaviours that make society unpleasant are increasingly packaged as entertainment.
What are our children learning about restraint?
I think about this increasingly as a father.
Not because I want my daughters growing up frightened to speak.
Quite the opposite.
I want them confident.
Independent.
Capable of challenging things they believe are wrong.
And comfortable expressing their own opinions.
But I also want them to understand that not every emotional response requires immediate action.
You can be angry without becoming aggressive.
You can be upset without taking it out on somebody else.
You can disagree without being cruel.
You can recognise that somebody has behaved badly without feeling obliged to humiliate them in return.
And you can experience an unpleasant interaction without allowing it to determine how you treat the next person.
Those aren't simply lessons about manners.
They're lessons about agency.
The ability to recognise that your emotions are real without automatically surrendering control of your behaviour to them.
And as parents, we don't teach those lessons simply by telling children what to do.
We demonstrate them.
Every time somebody cuts us up in traffic.
Every time we have to wait longer than expected.
Every time a service falls short.
Every time somebody disagrees with us.
Children watch how we respond.
They notice whether we become aggressive.
Whether we make unnecessarily personal remarks.
Whether we blame everybody else.
Whether we apologise when we get something wrong.
And whether we can experience frustration without making everybody around us suffer for it.
Of course, I don't always get that right.
I lose patience.
I get irritated.
Sometimes I react more sharply than I should.
I'm a human being.
Not some permanently calm, enlightened bloke floating around Northamptonshire dispensing wisdom.
But I think recognising those moments matters.
Because the point isn't to eliminate frustration.
It's to understand that frustration doesn't remove responsibility for what we do next.
And I wonder whether we're spending enough time helping children develop that distinction while they're being exposed to an extraordinary volume of adults doing precisely the opposite.
Adults arguing for entertainment.
Adults humiliating strangers.
Adults reacting disproportionately to minor inconveniences.
Adults being celebrated for saying things that would be entirely inappropriate in ordinary circumstances.
Children don't need to imitate every behaviour they witness for that environment to influence their expectations.
They simply need to start interpreting some of those behaviours as more normal than they actually are.
And that's a possibility I think we should take seriously.
The most socially intelligent person might be the one who says nothing
There's a particular kind of confidence I admire.
Not the loudest person in the room.
Not the person who always has a comeback.
Not the person who dominates every conversation.
The person who is perfectly capable of speaking but doesn't feel compelled to.
The person who can recognise an insult and choose not to respond.
The person who understands when somebody else needs to be heard.
The person who can tolerate being inconvenienced without interpreting it as a personal injustice.
And the person who can admit they've misjudged a situation without becoming defensive.
I think those qualities are enormously underrated.
Perhaps because they're difficult to turn into entertainment.
You can't easily produce a viral video of somebody not losing their temper.
You can't capture the insult they decided not to deliver.
You can't measure the argument they prevented.
And you can't necessarily identify the stranger whose day was made slightly easier because somebody else showed a little consideration.
Those moments don't announce themselves.
They simply make life more pleasant.
And perhaps that's why we underestimate their importance.
Because we're increasingly surrounded by content celebrating the most visible, dramatic and emotionally provocative examples of human behaviour.
While the quiet acts of restraint that allow people to coexist receive comparatively little attention.
But that doesn't make them less valuable.
Quite the opposite.
I suspect ordinary consideration is one of the most important forms of social competence we possess.
Not because it makes us agreeable.
But because it allows us to recognise that our individual preferences don't automatically outweigh everyone else's.
And that's something no algorithm can decide for us.
The behaviour we choose when nobody is watching
I keep coming back to those Devon country lanes.
Two strangers.
Two cars.
A narrow road.
A minor inconvenience.
And somebody decides to reverse.
Sometimes both do.
No argument.
No competition for dominance.
No need to demonstrate who's more important.
Just two people recognising that the situation requires a little cooperation.
It's such an ordinary interaction that most people probably wouldn't give it a second thought.
But perhaps that's why I find it so reassuring.
Because it demonstrates that consideration doesn't require extraordinary effort.
It doesn't need complicated rules.
It doesn't need public recognition.
And it certainly doesn't need an audience.
Sometimes it simply requires somebody to recognise that another person exists.
And to act accordingly.
That's the part of human behaviour I worry we're gradually undervaluing.
Not because I believe everyone has suddenly become selfish.
Not because I think social media has single-handedly destroyed our manners.
And not because I imagine society was perfect twenty years ago.
But because I see an environment in which immediate expression is increasingly encouraged, provocative behaviour is repeatedly rewarded, and ordinary people are exposed to examples of hostility throughout their day.
At the same time, we know from research that rudeness can influence subsequent interactions.
We know that social expectations can be shaped by the behaviour we observe.
And we know that circumstances such as time pressure can significantly influence whether people act considerately.
I think it's reasonable to question how those mechanisms might interact.
Whether they contribute to some people becoming quicker to react.
More defensive.
Less tolerant of inconvenience.
And less inclined to consider the experience of somebody else before acting.
I don't have a single study that proves that relationship across society.
I doubt such a study could adequately account for every influence involved.
But I don't believe the absence of that study makes the question irrelevant.
Because the social consequences we're examining aren't necessarily dramatic.
They can be gradual.
Cumulative.
And almost invisible in isolation.
One unnecessary insult.
One disproportionate reaction.
One moment of impatience.
One person deciding that their immediate feelings matter more than everybody else's experience.
Repeated across millions of ordinary interactions.
That's where I think the real significance might lie.
Not in the spectacular examples of cruelty that attract enormous audiences.
But in the small moments when people stop exercising the restraint that makes ordinary life bearable.
And perhaps the solution doesn't begin with telling comedians what they can say.
Or demanding that everybody become less offensive.
Or trying to remove every uncomfortable piece of content from the internet.
Perhaps it begins with something considerably more personal.
Recognising that the world doesn't revolve around us.
That our frustrations aren't automatically everybody else's responsibility.
That our opinions don't always require an audience.
And that being capable of delivering a devastating remark doesn't mean delivering it is the right thing to do.
Because having a thought is involuntary.
Feeling frustrated is human.
Getting angry is inevitable.
But what we choose to do with those experiences is where our responsibility begins.
The most worrying thing about a society losing its social brakes isn't that people suddenly become capable of cruelty.
We've always been capable of that.
It's that we gradually stop recognising the value of choosing not to be cruel.
And once that choice stops mattering, we've lost considerably more than our manners.
Independent research and sources
1. Foulk, T., Woolum, A., & Erez, A. (2016). Catching Rudeness Is Like Catching a Cold: The Contagion Effects of Low-Intensity Negative Behaviors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(1), 50–67.
Three studies investigating how exposure to rudeness can influence the interpretation of later interactions and contribute to hostile behaviour towards other people. The findings provide evidence of interpersonal behavioural contagion in organisational contexts.
https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000037
2. Woolum, A., Foulk, T., Lanaj, K., & Erez, A. (2017). Rude Color Glasses: The Contaminating Effects of Witnessed Morning Rudeness on Perceptions and Behaviors Throughout the Workday. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(12), 1658–1672.
Research examining how witnessing rudeness can affect people's perceptions and subsequent behaviour across a working day.
https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000247
3. Suler, J. (2004). The Online Disinhibition Effect. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321–326.
An influential theoretical account of why people sometimes express themselves more intensely online than in face-to-face interactions, including the effects of anonymity, invisibility, delayed communication and reduced perceptions of authority. It does not establish that online disinhibition necessarily transfers into offline behaviour.
https://doi.org/10.1089/1094931041291295
4. Darley, J. M., & Batson, C. D. (1973). From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27(1), 100–108.
A field experiment involving forty theological students. Participants under greater time pressure were substantially less likely to assist somebody apparently in distress. Demonstrates how situational circumstances can influence prosocial behaviour independently of stated values.
https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034449
5. Robertson, C. E., Del Rosario, K. S., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2024). Inside the Funhouse Mirror Factory: How Social Media Distorts Perceptions of Norms. Current Opinion in Psychology, 60, 101918.
An interdisciplinary review exploring how disproportionately visible extreme behaviour online can create distorted impressions of wider social expectations.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2024.101918
6. British Retail Consortium (2026). BRC Crime Report 2026.
Industry survey covering September 2024 to August 2025, documenting approximately 1,600 incidents of violence and abuse against retail workers per day, compared with approximately 455 per day in 2019–20.
https://brc.org.uk/news-and-events/news/operations/2026/ungated/brc-crime-report-2026/
7. Office of Rail and Road (2026). Mainline Rail Assaults Rise in Latest Annual Safety Statistics.
Official statistics published on 24 September 2026, documenting increases in reported assaults against passengers, members of the public and railway workers during April 2025 to March 2026.
https://www.orr.gov.uk/search-news/mainline-rail-assaults-rise-latest-annual-safety-statistics
8. Office for National Statistics (2026). Crime in England and Wales: Year Ending March 2026.
Official crime survey and police-recorded crime statistics, providing broader context on violence and antisocial behaviour. The data illustrate why trends in specific forms of hostility should not be treated as evidence that all forms of violent behaviour have increased.
Research gaps and questions for further investigation
Online-to-offline behavioural transfer: There is insufficient longitudinal evidence establishing whether habitual exposure to online hostility or provocative entertainment causes measurable reductions in restraint during ordinary face-to-face interactions.
Cumulative emotional priming: Further research is needed into whether repeated exposure to arguments, ridicule and hostility through personalised feeds influences how people interpret subsequent ambiguous social interactions.
The interaction between pressure and exposure: Existing research demonstrates that time pressure can influence prosocial behaviour and that rudeness can spread between people. More investigation is needed to determine whether these mechanisms interact within modern digitally saturated environments.
Everyday restraint: There is no comprehensive longitudinal measure of ordinary social restraint across the UK. Research could examine changes in patience, willingness to accommodate others, interpersonal hostility and responses to minor inconveniences.
Changing expectations of convenience: More evidence is needed to investigate whether personalised, immediate digital services influence people's tolerance of delay, compromise and inconvenience in physical environments.
Real-world hostility: Official statistics document substantial changes in particular forms of violence and abuse, but those trends are influenced by reporting practices, enforcement, economic circumstances and other variables. Research is needed to separate these influences from potential changes in underlying social behaviour.
Protective factors: Further investigation could examine whether empathy, emotional regulation, parental modelling, strong offline relationships and deliberate management of digital exposure moderate the proposed effects.
The central proposition of this essay is that repeated exposure to hostility, combined with changing expectations, time pressure and reduced inhibition, may contribute to some people's declining willingness to exercise restraint in ordinary interactions. The individual psychological mechanisms have research support, but their combined contribution to wider societal behaviour remains an open question.