The illusion of moral decline
Adam M. Mastroianni () and
Daniel T. Gilbert
Additional contact information
Adam M. Mastroianni: Columbia University
Daniel T. Gilbert: Harvard University
Nature, 2023, vol. 618, issue 7966, 782-789
Abstract:
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.
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:618:y:2023:i:7966:d:10.1038_s41586-023-06137-x
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06137-x
Access Statistics for this article
Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper
More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().