My paper with is out today in Nature: people believe that people are less kind than they used to be, they're probably wrong about that, and we have an idea where this illusion comes from.
Conversation
My whole life, I've heard people complain about the demise of human goodness. "Used to be you didn't have to lock your doors at night!" etc. Is this just a vocal minority, or do most people believe this?
Turns out, it's most people. 177 surveys, N = 220,772. Here's a sample:
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This isn't just the US. In 2002 and 2006, Pew sampled folks in every country highlighted in red below and asked them whether moral decline was a problem in their country. In *every single country* a majority of folks said it was at least a "moderately big" problem:
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Of course, all of these survey questions are a little weird. Do people actually think that people have become less kind, honest, nice and good?
Yes. They think this decline has been happening their whole lives and that it's still going on today. From our original studies:
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This doesn't seem to be a pandemic effect. We found the same results in January 2020 as we did in May 2020, as well as in 2021 and 2022. Plus all the archival data predates the pandemic.
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(By the way, we called this "the illusion of moral decline" because it rolls off the tongue better than "the illusion of the decline of kindness, niceness, honesty, and goodness". Obviously people can use "morality" to mean lots of things. This is what *we* are using it to mean.)
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When people say morality is declining, do they mean that *individuals* have gotten worse (personal change), or that worse folks have replaced better folks (interpersonal replacement)?
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We ran another study to find out, and turns out it's both. This isn't just a "kids these days" effect––it's an "everyone these days" effect
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Surprisingly, we only find small and inconsistent age effects. Older and younger people agree on the amount of decline per year. Older people have just been around longer to see more of it.
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Conservatives perceive more decline, but even the strongest liberals perceive it too.
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Okay, so people really seem to think that people have become less kind, honest, ethical, etc. Are they right?
One obvious strike against their theory is that violence seems to have declined (ie 's work). But––
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When people complain about moral decline, they mainly mean things like "people don't respect each other anymore." Has *that* changed?
There's no obvious and objective way to answer that question, but there's lots of useful survey data
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We found 140 surveys (N = 12 million) where people were asked multiple times about the current state of morality around them. We found strong evidence of no change over time. For instance:
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Meanwhile, a meta-analysis that came out last year found that cooperation rates in economic games *increased* from 1956 to 2017 (contrary to the authors' predictions). When we incentivized participants to estimate that change, they got it backwards:
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People believe there's been a big decrease in prosociality. That hasn't happened. So why do they believe in it?
Anything worth studying in psychology is probably multiply determined, but we have an explanation that uniquely fits our data
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First, people have biased exposure to negative information about the morality of people in general ("if it bleeds, it leads"). Second, they have biased memory––the negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information (the Fading Affect Bias)
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Put those together and you can produce an illusion where, even though every day looks equally bad, you mistakenly think yesterday looked better. This fits with some of our more surprising findings, like the lack of large age effects.
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It also suggests the illusion might decrease or disappear if you turn down one of those effects. And it seems like that happens. People probably don't have biased negative information about people they know, and indeed, they think those people have *improved* (or declined less)
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The other place we predicted less/no decline is in times before people were born, when there are no memories to fade. And indeed, people seem to believe that moral decline began when they arrived on Earth.
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This is just one potential mechanism; surely there are others at play.
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To recap:
1) People believe that people are less good than they used to be
2) They're probably wrong about that
3) Biased exposure and biased memory could create this illusion
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Morality probably isn't the only place where we can find this illusion. Lots of people claim that lots of things are declining. Some of them are probably right! But our results suggest that it's easy to see decline that isn't there.
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This illusion is a powerful tool for aspiring charlatans and despots. It's always helpful to allege decline––"Just put me in charge and I'll make things good again!"
(In 2015, 76% of Americans said "addressing moral breakdown" should be a government priority)
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(I know it's weird for me, Mr. Rise and Fall of Peer Review, to be publishing in a journal. We submitted this last July, and the process of getting it published was one inspiration for that piece.)
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I wrote an explainer on my blog, but Twitter throttles those links, so you'll have to find it in my bio.
Too bad! Seems like the morality of social media magnates has declined.
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