“Eventually, we refused to speak to him, but then his emails continued with the same language,” says Undy. At one point, she recalls, he made viciously crude comments to her, before finally directing his anger at the male engineer as well – “even threatening to come into the office and confront him face to face”. Undy has seen an increase in the number of aggressive customers over the past two years, and call center staff are far from alone. You may have noticed the proliferation of ‘Don’t take it off our staff’ signs on the walls of drab operating rooms, train stations and family-run restaurants, or sometimes felt a palpable tension in the public spaces we all inhabit. From shop workers to waiters and receptionists in surgeries, public-facing staff say they have experienced an increase in abusive treatment since the start of the Covid pandemic. The number of shop workers who have encountered abusive customers has risen by 25% since February this year, according to the latest figures from the Institute of Customer Service (ICS), while the British Medical Association revealed in May that criminal violence in GP surgeries it had almost doubled in five years. When the good times are rolling and there are plenty of jobs and homes for everyone, it’s easy to be nice In October 2021, a survey carried out for the ICS found that half of those who regularly dealt with the public had experienced abuse in the past six months – an increase of 6% – and 27% had been physically assaulted. The result has been a flurry of new policies, including legislation allowing tougher penalties for abusers, in an effort to protect staff who serve the public. Last month, Lincolnshire council announced a plan to restrict access to some services for “disturbing” customers, in response to a significant increase in “verbally abusive and aggressive” behavior directed at staff due to the pandemic. The change in the way some people behave means frontline workers have to deal with an added level of emotional labor to get their jobs done. “It’s really hard to hear someone say they hope my children die,” Bradley, an ambulance call assessor, said recently, supporting NHS ambulance staff’s Work Without Fear initiative. At Ageas, Undy describes the months of abuse unleashed on her and other staff as “draining, frustrating and insulting”. The abuse only ended when the client’s insurance policy was canceled and he was asked to sign a community resolution form by the police, which he did voluntarily. “By many, many metrics, violence has been in decline for a long time,” says Michael Muthukrishna, associate professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics. “It looks much better than it has ever looked in long history.” Yet in recent years, loneliness and mental health problems have eroded confidence and resilience and here we are, emerging from a world-shattering pandemic, only to face recession and climate change. We’ve all experienced the Armageddon atmosphere of empty supermarket shelves during the pandemic, along with medical product shortages and gas pumps running dry. Too many people have been driven into poverty by the cost of living crisis. I could go on. There’s no excuse for abusive behavior, but, Muthukrishna says, “Anything that increases stress will increase your anger and frustration and the likelihood of lashing out at someone. And maybe that’s enough to explain what specifically was happening during the pandemic.” Illustration: Sam Peet/The Guardian Behavioral science also points to a broader economic explanation. When the good times are rolling and there are plenty of jobs and homes for everyone, it’s easy to be nice. Muthukrishna has a neat car parking analogy: “There are things that make you angry. just as you might get irritated when someone slips in this space. If there’s a lot of space, you’re like, “Oh, what a bummer,” then you just find another space. These fractures that always exist in a society are tolerated when there are enough spaces to move around. We describe this as a ‘positive-sum environment’ – where the success of others doesn’t hurt your ability to do well,” he says. The twist comes when economic growth slows, creating a scary “zero-sum” environment: Now, he says, “the success of others is predictive of your failure. This creates a completely different dynamic. If you’re driving around for 30 minutes and you finally see a parking spot and someone is behaving like that, you’re going to see some road rage.” This could explain why abuse continues to rise even as we try to return to normal. “People are kind of on edge. It was difficult for many people. But now we’re going through these more systemic changes, where it seems like the pandemic has triggered some longer-term zero-sum psychological environments, where competition goes from productive to destructive.” This dark behavioral trend was already in motion before the pandemic, as reflected in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2019. Co-produced by insurer Zurich, one of the main risks to global business is: “The decline in human empathy creates global dangers in the ‘age of anger’. The report identified a new global phenomenon of people feeling “disconnected and isolated”, with technology and urbanization cauterizing social bonds. “Deep social instability” ranks sixth in the report’s top 30 risk chart. A Transport for London ‘Don’t take it out on our staff’ poster at a bus stop. Photo: LDNPix/Alamy Perhaps, too, the dehumanizing effects of online communication, which makes dishing out bile to strangers as easy as a “frictionless” online payment to many people, have now spilled over into the streets of IRL, along with its extreme, polarizing and reductive effects of social media. “The Internet allows us to form new tribes according to what we care about or believe in, and these new tribes are reshaping our societies in ways we’re still coming to terms with,” says Muthukrishna. “Any very small minority can find each other and start defending their common interests. Applies to LGBT groups. It’s true of arab spring groups, but it’s also true of QAnon, and white supremacist groups, or whatever weird, perverted, crazy, dark thing you care about. It might be good in the long run, but it’s essentially destabilizing.” Muthukrishna’s guess is that we are “in for a tough few years”. But we are not powerless as individuals to moderate the rise of rage. The more prepared we are for change, the smoother the ride will be. “If you create situations where people’s expectations are not met, you enable zero-sum psychology,” he says. A great human strength is that we can adapt to different comfort levels, but it’s change, he says, “that fires people up.” Being prepared for future conditions, he suggests, “can help create some solidarity, making people realize that we’re all in this together now. Where that’s not true, because of things like inequality, then you have to deal with those underlying things.” “The impact of verbal abuse on individuals is not insignificant.” Photo: vm/Getty Images Then there’s the Instagram effect. “It’s Fomo [fear of missing out]: why is this person on holiday in Mauritius and I’m sitting here trying to pay my bills? And 10,000 people, or even 10 million people see that person in Mauritius, feeling very unhappy,” says Muthukrishna. There’s even research, he says, “that shows that if your commute takes you to neighborhoods that are more affluent than yours, you’re more unhappy than if your commute takes you to neighborhoods that are like — or worse — than yours.” . Knowing this, and that many of the so-called better lives we live online are false, there is no harm in reducing our exposure to such deeply deflating stimuli. The word should also be spread that being nasty to people who are trying to do their job only makes the service we receive worse. Jo Causon, Chief Executive of the Institute for Customer Care, points out that understaffing is one of the main causes of poor customer service and frustration at the moment, and abusing staff, who are already working under increased pressure, can resign. very. While assault and spitting are less common than verbal abuse, he says, the effects of the latter, particularly for those who work from home, have an impact. “Some of these people have dealt with it on their own. If you receive calls from the contact center throughout the day and several of them start to become quite aggressive, the impact on individuals is not insignificant. It builds. We’ve seen an increase in people saying they’re not sure they’re going to stay, and definitely an increase in sickness as well.” If people feel socially anxious, this could turn into frustration and anger, Gillian Sandstrom, University of Sussex In early July, Edinburgh Airport had to temporarily close its customer service line because it was inundated with angry customers trying to retrieve their luggage – even though the luggage is not handled by the airport, but by the short-staffed airlines. “To allow our teams…
