Politics is wrapped in the narrative that we are suffering through a moral decline. Turns out, that is NOT true, so quit fretting.
Nature.com published a study a few weeks back that not only disputed the narrative of a moral decline but also offered up the factors that push people to believe it:
Biased Exposure: People are predominantly exposed to the bad stories of others (if it bleeds it leads)
Biased Memory: Bad things fade faster than good things leaving a more favorable view of the past.
Those two biases fool people into thinking everyone else is suffering and that they used to live in an easier time and there it is… things must be worse. Guess what? All evidence to the contrary and it is seen in many contemporary countries.
www.nature.com
Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining1,2. 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 resources3, the underuse of social support4 and social influence5.
Nature.com published a study a few weeks back that not only disputed the narrative of a moral decline but also offered up the factors that push people to believe it:
Biased Exposure: People are predominantly exposed to the bad stories of others (if it bleeds it leads)
Biased Memory: Bad things fade faster than good things leaving a more favorable view of the past.
Those two biases fool people into thinking everyone else is suffering and that they used to live in an easier time and there it is… things must be worse. Guess what? All evidence to the contrary and it is seen in many contemporary countries.
The illusion of moral decline - Nature
We show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced, and suggest that this illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources, the underuse of social support and social influence.
www.nature.com
Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining1,2. 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 resources3, the underuse of social support4 and social influence5.
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