Are We Nicer Yet?

That was the question posed by WaPo columnist John Kelly in his piece on the Choose Civility campaign recently (we've been on vaca so we're just catching up on things).

We're were drawn to this bit in his interview with Christie Lassen, director of PR for the HoCo Library system, the birthplace for the campaign:

But has any of it made people nicer to one another? The only way to know for sure is to have performed what's called a longitudinal study. Some benchmark should have been established before the campaign started and then a representative sampling of populace should have been surveyed regularly ever since. You could come up with a "civility quotient" and tracked it over time.

"We have not done any sort of studies like that," Christie said. "All we have right now are anecdotal stories."

Anecdotal stories are the bane of scientists but they still possess some value. Christie said people have reported being more understanding of other drivers when they spot a car magnet. Where most of the change seems to have occurred is in the behavior of the people with the magnets. No one wants to end up as the ironic punchline in another person's anecdote: "You'll never believe who cut me off on Route 29 today then flipped me the bird: a car with a 'Choose Civility' sticker!"

Alas, she coulda been describing us the other day, as we tooled about town in our sedan, proudly displaying our sticker even as we behaved very uncivilly to a fellow motorist who had just cut us off.

We felt silly afterward for getting in such a dither, and pledged to ignore such affronts in the future.

Were we embarrassed at becoming an ironic punchline? Maybe. Are we nicer? We're trying.