First, we collected 235 surveys with a total of more than 574,000 responses and found that the majority of people believe that people today are less kind, honest, ethical, and moral than they were in the past. This. People have believed in this moral decay at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, believing it in every country ever surveyed (59 and continues to increase), they believe it has happened throughout their lives, and they believe it continues. happened today. Respondents of all kinds – old and young, liberal and conservative, white and Black – consistently agreed: the golden age of human kindness is long gone.
We also found strong evidence that people were wrong about this decline. We put together all the surveys that ask people about their current moral situation: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?”, “In the last 12 months, have you volunteered your time with us?” yourself for a charitable cause?”, “How often do you do it?” encounter impoliteness at work? Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ responses did not change significantly over time. For example, when asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, people gave nearly identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morale. annual.
Other researchers’ data even showed an improvement in ethics. Social scientists have been measuring the rates of cooperation between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades and more recently. meta-analysis found — contrary to the authors’ expectations — that collaborations have grown by 8 percentage points over the past 61 years. When we asked participants to estimate that change, they mistakenly thought that the rate of cooperation had decreased by 9 percentage points. Others documented the growing rarity of the most heinous forms of human immorality, such as genocide and child abuse.
Two age-old psychological phenomena can combine to create this illusion of moral decay. First, there’s the exposure of bias: People mostly come across and notice negative information about others – the mischief and misbehavior that make the news and dominate their conversations. ta.
Second, there is a false memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positive of positive information. For example, being abandoned will hurt you in the moment, but as you rationalize, reorganize, and move away from the memory, the painful feeling will go away. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.
