“The Illusion of Moral Decline,” by Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert appeared in the journal Nature on June 7, 2023, and challenges the idea of the wide spread belief that there is moral decline. That is one theme that runs through most of the articles at the Alor.org blog, so naturally, I was interested. The paper first states that numerous surveys show that across the world people believe that moral decline has occurred. And, there is plenty of evidence of this in fact, at least depending if one is a conservative or not. Almost all of the so-called progressive movements since the 1960s, ranging from feminism and the destruction of the nuclear family, right through to the attack upon traditional manhood and the transgender agenda have been viewed as moral decline by conservatives, especially Christians.

However, Mastroianni and Gilbert have countered this with an analysis of data allegedly showing that individuals’ evaluation of fellow contemporaries’ morality has remained unchanged. They conclude that it is thus a myth to suppose that morality is declining, as the two claims are inconsistent.

In reply, their survey data does not prove their thesis. It is quite possible that there could be an unchanged view of their contemporaries’ morality, while still claiming there was a general decline in morality over a longer period of time. And, as well, this view, while confirmed by the data they produced, does not account for the fact that millions of people, such as Trump supporters in the US, do see America as in decline on all fronts, including morally. Thus, I find the research odd to say the least. There are millions who simply do not have an unchanged view of their fellow’s’ mortality, but see it as degenerate. I can name plenty myself. Here is but one example:

https://gellerreport.com/2023/06/pride-month-kicks-off-with-outrageous-sexual-acts-in-front-of-children-nationwide.html/?lctg=23533907

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x

“Abstract

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.

Main

The social fabric appears to be unravelling: civility seems like an old-fashioned habit, honesty like an optional exercise and trust like the relic of another time. Some observers6 claim that “the process of our moral decline” began with the “sinking of the foundations of morality” and proceeded to “the final collapse of the whole edifice”, which brought us “finally to the dark dawning of our modern day, in which we can neither bear our immoralities nor face the remedies needed to cure them”. But as apt as this description of our times may seem, it was written more than 2,000 years ago by the historian Livy, who was bemoaning the declining morality of his fellow Roman citizens. From ancient to modern times, social observers have often lamented the ugly turns their societies have taken, and have often suggested that a recent decline in morality—in kindness, honesty and basic human decency—was among the causes2^,7.

Why have so many different people in so many different times and places been convinced that their fellow citizens are now less moral than they once were? One possibility is that morality has, in fact, been declining worldwide for millennia—declining so steadily and so precipitously that people in every era have been able to observe that decline in the brief span of a human lifetime. The other possibility is that the perception of moral decline is a psychological illusion to which people all over the world and throughout history have been susceptible. We provide evidence for the latter possibility. First, we show that people in at least 60 nations do indeed believe that morality is declining, and that they have believed this for at least 70 years. Second, we show that people attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Third, we show that people’s reports of the current morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, which strongly suggests that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Fourth and finally, we describe tests of a simple psychological mechanism that can produce the illusion of moral decline and can predict some of the circumstances under which it will be attenuated, eliminated or reversed (for example, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born).

Is morality declining?

People believe that morality is declining. Is it? Societies keep (or at least leave) reasonably good records of extremely immoral behaviour such as slaughter and conquest, slavery and subjugation or murder and rape, and careful analyses of those historical records strongly suggest that these objective indicators of immorality have decreased significantly over the last few centuries15^,16. On average, modern humans treat each other far better than their forebears ever did—which is not what one would expect if honesty, kindness, niceness and goodness had been decreasing steadily, year after year, for millennia. Although there are no similarly objective historical records of everyday morality—of how often people offer their seats to an elderly person, give directions to a lost tourist or help their neighbour fix a fence—there are subjective measures of such things.