It’s almost cliche to say that humans are social creatures who seek connections. And yet it seems that small gestures of common courtesy needed to communicate this connection have disappeared.

People never hold the door open out of kindness anymore. Fewer people say “thank you” after a small favor. It’s causing us to let the thoughtfulness and kindness behind these gestures slip through our fingers. Without them, social interaction shifts from natural to transactional, or even unfriendly. This, in turn, makes building trust between peers all the more difficult.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Center report, this anti-social behavior is partly because the COVID-19 pandemic killed our sense of common courtesy. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted norms around basic polite gestures — like holding the door open for someone behind you — according to “Recovering Civility during COVID-19.”

Smaller social interactions aren’t as common as they were before: We avoid each other’s eyes, and we stare at our phones when we walk to class. Common courtesy is crumbling, and so is our sense of connection as students. 

For many of us, quarantine threw a wrench in a crucial period of our adolescent development by shifting our interactions from in-person to virtual: Our sense of social awareness diminished due to a lack of face-to-face interaction. It’s not necessarily our generation’s fault that some of us might only think about ourselves, even if it resembles a distrust in others or even competition. 

But we have neglected to make the effort to recover from the deterioration of our basic manners. These basic gestures of kindness are what connect us across this campus and in life, even though we’re strangers. They hammer in us a sense of camaraderie between students all navigating times of uncertainty. 

An article detailing the bridge between emotional communication and nonverbal gestures published in Frontiers in Psychology said that “the majority of gestures are produced in association with speech: in this way the message assumes a specific meaning.” Simply put, your physical actions reflect what you’re feeling or thinking beneath the surface. 

Letting the door slam in another person’s face after you only opened it for yourself conveys a message of carelessness, or even cynicism. It’s those negative attitudes that erode our camaraderie as students. The necessity of a strong community lies in our nature as innately social creatures; having peers to lean on during stressful times is vital to our wellbeing. 

Speech, which follows physical action, is also typically a reflection of what’s going on in our minds. Gestures are a large piece of how humans communicate what they’re thinking; it’s not a far-off assumption that holding the door open or saying “thank you” — or avoiding it — says something about the way a person perceives the people around them. 

These little gestures mean we’re not just thinking about ourselves; they mean we’re taking other people into consideration around us, even if unconsciously. That’s what ultimately builds empathy and selflessness, resulting in a more welcoming culture.

As one of the most selective universities in the nation, it’s no coincidence that we may perhaps feel too busy or rushed to take the extra step for someone else. These interactions may seem insignificant, but on a campus where students are constantly bolting from one commitment to the next, they’ve become increasingly more important.

Isaiah Moreno, a junior majoring in real estate development, has noticed this shift.

“It really doesn’t take a lot of time. Maybe like, one or two seconds to say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ or … to hold the door open,” Moreno said. 

Perhaps this decline in politeness has been a product of USC’s culture as a highly selective institution; in a university where everything might feel cutthroat, little gestures get lost in the chaos.

“This school is such a competitive environment that even small things like holding a door, people don’t even have time for,” Moreno said. “People gotta go to a club, people gotta go eat.”

But it is much deeper than a door slamming in your face or being too busy for an “excuse me”; it’s about the gradual suffocation of our student bonds. And without a community, we lose one of our core values as an institution: community. 

Without community, we’ll eventually lose close bonds with friends and isolate ourselves. Looking beyond already existent friendships, polite gestures often start conversations between others because of their rarity. Without these mundane interactions, that potential is lost as well. As a whole, we may eventually reject the vulnerability of friendship and dismiss the value of kindness. 

While this phenomenon raises questions of nature versus nurture — whether we’ve grown unconsciously accustomed to this behavior, or if certain upbringings or global cultures have an effect on it — we can still make an effort to bring back tiny polite gestures. Start small: offer your seat to someone, or help carry a friend’s groceries.

It’s simple: manners matter. It’s not embarrassing to be courteous, and most of all, kind to others. These small actions take five seconds at most, but they mean everything.