https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x
"Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining.
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 resources, the underuse of social support and social
influence."
Via Tess.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
