Any solid statistical analysis of the apparent huge increase in people acting like dicks?

[Silent3]

I'm pretty certain that it's a real phenomena at some level, and that a big part of it is that Trump gave an awful lot of somewhat quietly reserved but inwardly nasty people the feeling of freedom they craved to let their asshole flags fly high and proud.

Some specific things, like unruly airline passengers, are well-documented. 2021 had a 600% increase in incidents over the previous year.

I'm not sure how well other things are tracked, on the whole spectrum from adults throwing loud and childish temper tantrums all the way up to unhinged, violent assaults triggered by petty annoyances like a fast-food employee forgetting to put pickles on a burger. It would be interesting to further to separate out non-COVID-related dickishness from the maskholes and the belligerent anti-vaxxers.

As a non-COVID example, a video someone posted earlier today on DU, where a woman was freaking out because there weren't any yachts available for her to rent. (Talk about zero-eth world problems.)

The ubiquity of cellphones both captures a lot of this bullshit, but distorts how much there is at the same time. We can all be sure, for instance, that police abuse of power has had a long and inglorious history going well back before video cameras, and then cellphones, helped reveal what had long been hiding in the shadows.

So where are we really at? 10% more dickishness? 50%, 300% more? I really have no idea. My almost certainly distorted media impression feels like 1000-1500% more. For what I encounter in real life personally, it's more like the 10% range. The truth is probably somewhere in that wide swath of uncertainty in between.

[Xipe Totec]

1. Statistics are only useful when you have to sample information

But when the entire population of dicks is visible in plain sight, statistics are unnecessary.

[Silent3]

6. If you count voting for Trump and other Republicans as acts of dickishness...

...then, yes, the numbers are clearly huge. But I myself haven't experienced much of the acting-out-publicly kind of dickishness in person, not counting what I see online and in the news, that makes the increase of stuff "visible in plain sight" appear all that large.

YMMV.

[Xipe Totec]

7. I do. nt

[L. Coyote]

10. First we had the Silent Majority, then the Moral Majority, now it's the Stupid Majority.

[paleotn]

15. They finally got their name right.

[paleotn]

14. Ha! It is easier working with the population....

No statistical inference necessary. They're all out in the open.

[Hekate]

2. After years of oppression by a culture that demanded a minimum of decency & good manners...

…they were set free! Trump gave them permission to be their authentic selves — and this, by gods, is the result.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

17. Narcissists gone wild

Unchained and unhinged.

These fucking wastes of skin are everywhere and something has to knock thier petulant asses back under the rocks they crawled out from.

[Guilded Lilly]

20. Bingo. Enabled to the max. No accountability. Reality Show mentality...

For decades.
And an arrogant, belligerent disrespect for teachers/education.

The Stupid.

[Wicked Blue]

29. Well said!

[Mr.Bill]

3. Three words:

Lack of Consequences.

[NewHendoLib]

4. THIS...

[onecaliberal]

12. Yes!

Hit the nail on the head.

[paleotn]

16. Bingo!

[LetMyPeopleVote]

5. Some believe that TFG gave these racists and assholes permission to be themselves

TFG is a racist asshole and his followers are imitating TFG

[ymetca]

8. To me anyway

the global income inequality stats are the real "tell" here. Plenty of evidence that it is out of control, heading toward a melt-down. But we'd really like to avoid WWIII this time.

Maybe the communication technology is a little ahead of our ability to cope and adapt, and there are too many unscrupulous players attempting to exploit both its power and our human weaknesses to their advantage.

Perhaps ubiquitous social media will help us better identify the biggest "dicks" this time around? So that we are not all herded into another global conflagration?

Fingers crossed!

[Klaralven]

9. The murder rate was up 30% in 2020; probably up another 5% in 2021 when all the data is in

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/27/what-we-know-about-the-increase-in-u-s-murders-in-2020/

[Silent3]

11. That's quite significant

I also see from the chart that the murder rate was well above 2019 too, which rules out simple year-to-year increase caused by some sort of COVID-shut-down murder hiatus for a year.

[jmbar2]

13. Reality TV shows, social media and video games

Reality TV shows and social media normalize extremely narcissistic and Machiavellian behavior. Most of the reality shows are about backstabbing and eliminating others. Think of all the screaming that goes on in these shows. I don't know real people who shout at each other like this. If you grew up with this type of media, perhaps people think it is normal.

Violent video games normalize lack of empathy, dominating and eliminating others.

Then you have the religious and political domination/eliminationist trends that demonize the "other".

Democracy and self-governance require that we moderate our own demands to meet the needs of a broad group of others -- including those with whom we may disagree.

Popular images of social interaction offer few models of how to coexist in peace with folks who are different from us, or how to work out disagreements constructively.

[paleotn]

19. Well said.

[Guilded Lilly]

22. Absolutely. The race for ratings lead us to pond scum values in the most vocal and visual of media.

The corrections will take years, if not decades.

[GodlessX]

25. Video games

Numerous studies have shown no connection between video games and violent behavior; the American Psychological Association states there is little to no evidence connecting violence to video games.

[jmbar2]

26. I'm aware of the research...

But I do think that constantly engaging in fantasy violence weakens empathy. No data for it, just my gut feeling.

I always wanted to be able to develop a game of ER doctor where you have gunshot and other accident victims coming in the door, and you have just minutes to save their lives. It could be just as exciting as shooting the guns, but you are racing to identify the type of wound and try to save the life.

For the lives you don't save, you have to go tell the family and experience their grief.

Just a wild-assed fantasy.

[paleotn]

18. Propensity for dickishness has always been there..

and probably at the same levels or % of the populace as any other time in human history. Null hypothesis anyways. Cultural norms tend to keep it under wraps at times, but it's always there. Could be it's just become fashionable in certain groups to be an ass in public. This didn't start with Trump. It's been building for at least a couple decades. Fanned by reich wing media and social media in general in my opinion.

[Sherman A1]

21. Having worked retail grocery for 43 years

I can safely say that it has been getting progressively worse as the wealth gap increased. People have been angry for a very long time, they just never knew whom with they were angry.

[renate]

23. I've wondered this too

Partly by imagining how we appear in the eyes of the world.

When I traveled as a kid, I remember feeling like people from the rest of the world must be pretty envious of my US passport. We had a few pretty bad years when the world blamed us for Bush, but then we were redeemed by electing Obama. Now I think that if I traveled with my passport I would be genuinely pitied, if not disliked, for being American. We seem like a bunch of violent, simple-minded, rage-filled, screaming-eagle yahoos.

Maybe the stress of the pandemic just made previously normal-ish people extra vulnerable to the inchoate rage channeled by Donald Trump; I hope that once life returns to normal it'll go down several notches.

[jmbar2]

27. I was out of the country for a few years until 1991

When I got back, I was acutely aware that something had changed. I was walking across a college campus at lunchtime, and in the quad, I heard a radio broadcast of someone talking about "feminazis". It was my first time to hear Rush Limbaugh, and I was shocked that it was playing on campus.

The people hanging around that group seemed like today's incels, not the peace living hippies that I had known on that campus from years earlier.

I really noticed the change when Obama was elected. We started having Tea Party ugliness at the townhalls talking about Obamacare. Thugs would appear and try to intimidate people. I had never seen that before.

They were blathering about "death panels" and socialized medicine. I made a bunch of name tags that said "I am uninsurable due to a preexisting condition. I need Obamacare". People started asking for them. Soon, people all through the audience were wearing them.

It seemed to moderate the bullies to look out there and see how many people were uninsurable. Then they left.

[shrike3]

24. Husband and I just talked about this the other day.

Trump gave them permission to be their worst selves.

[Fyrefox]

28. Mean is keen, and hate is great...

Bad behavior of all kinds is up across the board from the Trump years, even with regards to driving behavior. Trump and his enablers exposed, validated, and embraced the lower side of human nature. Good behavior has been redefined to whatever you can successfully get away with. Consider that 75 million people saw their way clear to vote for Trump in 2020, knowing what they were getting! We may get rid of Trump, but the monster he unleashed is alive and well, and beyond control…

[lame54]

30. It's rising like Jeff Bezo's rocket