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The Illusion of Moral Decline
I first saw a link to this paper from a Mastodon post by John Carlos Baez [mathstodon.xyz]:
For millennia people have been saying that morality has declined during their lifetime. But there's not much evidence for this continuing decline of morality.
If morality has not declined, then why do people think it has? Although there are surely many good answers to this question, we suggest that one of them has to do with the fact that when two well-established psychological phenomena work in tandem, they can produce an illusion of moral decline. First, numerous studies have shown that human beings are especially likely to seek and attend to negative information about others, and mass media indulge this tendency with a disproportionate focus on people behaving badly. As such, people may encounter more negative information than positive information about the morality of 'people in general', and this 'biased exposure effect' may help explain why people believe that current morality is relatively low. Second, numerous studies have shown that when people recall positive and negative events from the past, the negative events are more likely to be forgotten, more likely to be misremembered as their opposite and more likely to have lost their emotional impact. This 'biased memory effect' may help explain why people believe that past morality was relatively high.
The Nature paper abstract:
Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people's reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources, the underuse of social support and social influence.
Journal Reference:
Mastroianni, A.M., Gilbert, D.T. The illusion of moral decline [open]. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06137-x [doi.org]
