Is society experiencing a moral decline? A study suggests no
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Two researchers have analyzed survey data from 12.5 million respondents and found that over the last 70 years, people in 60 countries have believed that the moral state of society is degrading.
However, their assessments of the virtue of their contemporaries have hardly changed year by year.
The idea of moral decline in modern society is widely known and dates back at least to antiquity.
In the 20th century, with the development of research techniques in sociology and technological progress in telecommunications, scientists had the opportunity to conduct quantitative measurements of public morality.
THE STUDY
Now, Adam Mastroianni from Columbia University in New York, and Daniel Gilbert, collected and analyzed surveys of 220,000 Americans conducted from 1949 to 2019.
The surveys included questions such as "has our society become less honest and moral over the past decades, more, or has the extent to which people are honest and moral not changed?"
Most participants - from the USA and 59 other countries - indicated in about 85% of the survey points that morality is in decline.
And the proportion of participants who answered this way was roughly the same in different years.
More than half of the respondents also mentioned that contemporary society has achieved certain moral progress, such as improved attitudes towards African Americans, people with physical disabilities, and homosexuals.
In 2020, Mastroianni and Gilbert conducted three more surveys, in which a total of 1230 Americans participated.
They were asked to assess how kind, honest, friendly, and good people were in 2020, 2010, 2014, 2016, as well as in the year of their birth and the year they turned 20.
The lowest ratings on this metric in all surveys were received in 2020.
The researchers concluded that while people are convinced that the moral state of society is deteriorating over time, their assessments of their contemporaries' virtues remain roughly the same.
This effect may arise from our bias.
Research shows that we pay more attention to negative information about others, but we remember the good more than the bad.
As a result, it may seem that there is a lot of evil around today, and we conveniently forget the bad that was in the past.
Sources:
- Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x
- Morning Brew: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2023/06/09/inside-the-illusion-of-moral-decline
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