On or off the field, it's a 'civility' war out there

Good manners left on the sideline as people 'express' themselves

When NBA stars are part of the courtside fracas and college football players fight on the field, it's more than just a hotheaded moment of competition.

Psychologists, professors and manners experts say the brawl this month at the Indiana Pacers vs. Detroit Pistons game and another nationally televised confrontation between college players from Clemson and South Carolina are symptoms of a larger problem that goes beyond sports or even athletes' egos.

''We for years have been taught that the problem with anger is that people don't express it,'' Michigan psychologist Carl Semmelroth says. ''Now the problem of anger is that it's expressed too much. We see it everywhere, and we go overboard with sports.''

Semmelroth, author of four books on anger management, says people tend to be kind to a small group, whether they be family or friends. But step outside that circle, and they give themselves ''permission to do awful things to people outside that line.''

''Civilization means every urge we have isn't acted upon,'' he says.

But all too often, those urges seem harder to control. That's one reason that P.M. Forni co-founded the Johns Hopkins Civility Project in 1997. Now called the Civility Initiative, the effort aims to assess the significance of civility and manners in society.

Forni, a professor of Italian literature, says civility is on a steep decline -- a danger sign, because research suggests there is a causal connection between incivility and violence. He says incidents such as the Columbine school shootings in 1999 illustrated how students who felt they had been slighted by their peers erupted into violence. Forni cites statistics from the U.S. Labor Department showing there have been about 1.8 million acts of violence in the American workplace every year for the past five years.

''Teenagers and people in their 20s and 30s have been encouraged to express themselves. They are imbued with a strong sense of self-esteem,'' he says. ''But sometimes we have gone overboard because we have not balanced this enthusiastic embrace of a self-esteem education with an education in self-restraint.''

Experts say that what started with the individualistic emphasis of 1960s culture has evolved into today's less formal, more laid-back lifestyle in which the inclination is to say what you think and do what you feel. Some say it's an angrier society. Others say it's merely less genteel.

''There was that 'me generation' kind of attitude starting in the '60s. . . . Some of these lessons did get skipped,'' says Peggy Post, great-granddaughter-in-law of Emily Post, whose first etiquette book was published in 1922.

Lack of courtesy and respect is a serious problem, according to about 80% of 2,013 Americans surveyed in 2002 by Public Agenda, a non-profit public opinion research group; 60% said the problem was getting worse. Last year, an update that focused on the travel industry found that 49% of travel workers had witnessed a situation in which disrespectful behavior threatened to escalate into a physical confrontation, and 19% said it actually had.

Meanwhile, good manners and religious faith are the qualities that parents most want to instill in young offspring, according to an August 2003 survey of 1,060 parents for Parents magazine. And the manners aren't just for the dinner table. The most important behaviors cited were those involving other people, including respecting others and being considerate.

Whether people are angrier than they used to be, they tell you and show you more than ever -- on the road, in the subway or at the supermarket. Experts say there has been such a steep decline in civility over the past few generations that, suddenly, manners matter.

''The pendulum has definitely swung back,'' Post says. ''We're just more crowded than ever in our world, and more informal. A lot of people think informality means not being civil or polite. We can be informal and still be mannerly.''

So is there too much focus on the antics of athletes?

''There has always been this violence in sports, even among the ancient Greeks and the Roman Empire,'' says Leonard Zaichkowsky, a Boston University sports psychologist and former hockey player.

''Too many coaches feel that good sportsmanship is mutually exclusive from being an aggressive, assertive player.

''I think they're dead wrong,'' he says. But ''it starts very early because of our emphasis on winning rather than learning to get the value from sports. So much of what we do in life is mirrored in sport participation. Is (violence in sports) more prevalent now? It appears that it is. It was not good then and isn't now. We have to do something about it.''

To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com

© Copyright 2004 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Back to News