A series of studies has found that people tend to believe morality has declined over time, regardless of the decade or country they were in, and that they tend to think the decline started around the time they were born. The findings, published in Nature, suggest there is a pervasive illusion of moral decline that is the result, at least in part, of two common psychological biases.
“My whole life, I’ve heard people claim that humans are less good to each other than they used to be. ‘When I was a kid, you could leave your door unlocked,’ that sort of thing,” explained study author Adam Mastroianni, an experimental psychologist and the author of the science blog Experimental History.
“If people are right about that, it’s the story of the century! Every scientist should stop what they’re doing and figure out how to restore morality. But if people are wrong, we have another interesting question on our hands: why do people think this has happened when it actually hasn’t?”
To gather initial data regarding the perception of moral decline, the researchers performed keyword-term searches in the Roper Center for Public Opinion iPoll Database and manually searched databases such as the General Social Survey, Pew Research Center, Gallup, the American National Election Studies, the World Values Survey, the European Social Survey, and the European Values Survey. The goal was to locate survey items that asked participants about their perceptions of changes in morality over time.
Across the 177 survey items identified, 84.18% of participants in the United States reported that morality had declined. Importantly, this perception remained consistent over the 70-year span from 1949 to 2019, indicating that U.S. residents have been reporting moral decline at the same rate throughout this period. This finding suggests that the belief in moral decline is not a recent phenomenon but has been a long-standing perception.
Interestingly, participants were more likely to perceive moral decline when asked about longer periods of time (e.g., the last few decades) compared to shorter periods (e.g., the last year).
The perception of moral decline was not unique to U.S. residents. An analysis of survey items from 59 nations, involving a total of 354,120 participants, showed that on 86.21% of the items, the majority of participants also reported that morality had declined. This finding indicates that people across the world share a belief in the decline of morality.
In a series of three additional studies, the researchers asked U.S. participants to rate how “kind, honest, nice, and good” people were in the present day compared to the past. The participants — 1,230 in total — were recruited through Prolific and Amazon Mechanical Turk. All three studies found a similar pattern of results: participants perceived a moral decline in people over time. For example, participants rated people as less kind, honest, nice, and good in 2020 compared to 2010 and 2000.
Older participants perceived more decline than younger participants. However, when considering the annual rate of moral decline, it was found that older participants did not perceive a higher rate compared to younger participants. The researchers found that the perception of greater moral decline among older participants was primarily due to considering longer periods of time.
“Older and younger people seem to perceive about the same amount of decline,” Mastroianni said.
In another study of 319 U.S. residents, the researchers found evidence that people attributed the moral decline to both the decreasing morality of individuals over time and the decreasing morality of successive generations.
The researchers then analyzed data from surveys conducted over a 55-year period that had asked participants to report on various aspects of current morality. The results indicated that people’s assessments of the current morality of their contemporaries did not change significantly over time. The year in which the survey was conducted explained less than 1% of the variance in responses, suggesting that any changes in reported morality were negligible at best. In other words, there was no evidence that morality was actually in decline.
Mastroianni also noted that a study published last year, which analyzed 511 studies conducted over the course of 61 years, found evidence that cooperative behavior had actually increased over time.
“There’s a study that we didn’t have space for in the main text, but that answers the question in a different way. Social scientists have, for decades, brought people into the lab and asked them to play various ‘economic games’ –– basically, they can choose to be greedy and make more money, or they can choose to be generous and make less money,” Mastroianni explained.
“Previous researchers have found that cooperation rates in these games actually increased about 10 percentage points from 1956 to 2017. When we asked participants to estimate that change and paid them a bonus for getting it right, they thought that cooperation had fallen by about 10 percentage points.”
The authors proposed a mechanism called the “biased exposure and memory” (BEAM) to explain why people perceived moral decline despite evidence to the contrary. This mechanism suggests that biased exposure to negative information about current morality and biased memory for positive information about past morality can create an illusion of moral decline. The tendency to focus on negative information and the selective recall of positive events from the past work together to shape people’s perception of moral change.
“Most people in the world believe that humans are less good to one another than they used to be,” Mastroianni said. But “they’re almost certainly wrong about that. Two psychological phenomena can combine to produce that illusion.”
To test this mechanism, the researchers conducted two more studies, which included 670 U.S. residents in total. They found that when participants were asked to rate the moral change among people in their personal worlds rather than people in general, they tended to report moral improvement over time, suggesting a reversal of the illusion of moral decline.
When participants were asked to rate the morality of people in general in the years before they were born, they tended to perceived moral decline in the years after their birth but not before, supporting the idea that biased memory contributes to the illusion of moral decline.
But like all research, the studies have limitations. Some of the data used were not specifically collected for studying moral decline, and some questions were not clear or precise enough. Additionally, the studies focused on the United States, which limits generalizability. The studies also couldn’t determine the exact cause of the illusion of moral decline.
“We’re limited by the archival data we have available, which only goes back to 1949 at the earliest,” Mastroianni said.
The study, “The illusion of moral decline“, was authored by Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert.
