3BI: the illusion of moral decline (and taking a break)
Hello everyone!
Quick programming update before we get into this edition: I’m going to be off on parental leave for the next month, so the newsletter will be taking a break for July. I’ll be back in August after adjusting to life with a newborn :)
The illusion of moral decline
How often do you hear someone complain about “people these days” and opine about how much worse our manners and morals are today than the past? Statistically speaking, you’re likely to hear it pretty often. In a new study, researchers Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert pored over hundreds of thousands of data points from surveys across the world and found a pretty strong consensus:
We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past.
Such surveys ask questions like whether someone thinks society has become less or more honest and ethical in its behavior the last few decades or if the state of moral values in their country is getting better or getting worse. In 84.18% of those questions, the majority of participants reported that morality had declined. This is remarkably consistent across time and geography:
People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.
Thankfully, the data suggests that this perception is wrong and humans are not actually getting progressively worse over time. For one, objective data suggests otherwise. Societal records clearly show that serious immoral behavior has significantly decreased over the last few centuries, such as war, slavery, subjugation, murder, and rape. It’s hard to argue that modern humans don’t treat each other much better than they did in history books. Additionally, social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in research for decades, and in a recent meta-analysis of such studies found that cooperation has actually increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years.
Further, the same survey respondents do not appear to have even experienced these perceived declines in their personal lives:
We assembled every survey that asked people about the current state of morality: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” “Within the past 12 months, have you volunteered your time to a charitable cause?”,“How often do you encounter incivility at work?” Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time. When asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year.
So, while people report no change in their personal experiences with the morality of others over time, their perception of the outside world has worsened.
Writer Derek Thompson noticed a similar phenomenon in current economic attitudes and dubbed it the “everything is terrible but I’m fine” philosophy:
The Fed also asked Americans how they felt about the local and national economy. And though the number of Americans who said that they personally were “doing at least okay” actually rose slightly from 2019 to 2021, their evaluation of the national economy plummeted in that time frame. If this graph were a bumper sticker, it would read: everything is terrible, but i’m fine.
So why is it that so many us adopt the “Everything is terrible but I’m fine” philosophy? Mastroianni and Gilbert put forward two psychological phenomena that may combine to produce this illusion of moral decline.
Biased exposure
The first is biased exposure, where “people predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our conversations.”
…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
This was demonstrated in the study by people’s opinion of their personal network’s morality. Not only did they claim morality was stable in their personal experiences, as mentioned above, but they also believed that the people they know personally had actually shown moral improvement over time:
…participants believed that the individuals who were in their personal worlds in both 2005 and 2020 had shown moral improvement over that period rather than moral decline.
When we spend a lot of time with people, we see their good side and bad sides, as well as their growth and change over time. We also naturally choose to spend time with people who’s good traits outweigh the bad. We have limited exposure to those outside of our circle, though, and often don’t even pay attention to them unless it’s something bad or threatening. The inherent negativity bias of the media strengthens this effect, as we’re much more likely to see news stories about bad behavior of others rather than the good.
Biased memory
The second is biased memory, when the negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information.
…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.
While we have a clear negativity bias toward the present, we tend to romanticize the past, as even bad memories improve with greater context. Getting fired from a job is awful in the moment, but with the benefit of hindsight, we see it as a necessary step to a better position and professional growth later.
This makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective, as our brains are naturally attuned to threats in the present, but have no need to remember them after they’ve passed.
Biased exposure and memory work in tandem to create the illusion of moral decline:
When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline. Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.
Like so many other aspects of our psychology, it’s important to remember that perception often doesn’t match reality.
Check out the full study in Nature and the authors’ summary in the New York Times.
Enjoy your summer and I’ll see you again in August!