Morality is declining, right? Scientists say that idea is an illusion

Adam Mastroianni was always bothered by anecdotal claims that people are becoming less kind, respectful and trustworthy over time. So he took a deep dive into such claims: he wrote a PhD dissertation.

Now Mastroianni and a collaborator have drawn on decades’ worth of survey results and other data to find that people around the world have perceived a general moral decline for at least the past 70 years¹. But the data also show that individuals’ evaluation of their contemporaries’ morality has remained largely unchanged during that time. Mastroianni, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York City, and his co-author Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conclude that the perception of moral decline is an illusion.

The findings were published in Nature on 7 June.

Not so nice

To examine the common idea that morality is waning, Mastroianni and Gilbert analysed US surveys about moral values conducted between 1949 and 2019. In response to around 84% of the survey questions, most participants reported that morality had declined. Similar results were seen in surveys done in 59 other countries.

The authors also conducted their own series of surveys in 2020 and found that US participants said that people were less “kind, honest, nice and good” than they had been in times past, such as the year the participant was born. The perception of moral decline was shared by people of various political ideologies, races, genders, ages and educational levels.

The appetite for right

The researchers also examined surveys that asked people to report on the current state of their own morality and that of their contemporaries. The authors chose surveys that had been administered at least twice, with a minimal interval of ten years, so that answers could be compared across time. These included questions such as “How would you rate the overall state of moral values in this country today?”

If morality had actually declined over time, people would be expected to rate their peers more negatively than had those who took the same survey earlier. But the data revealed that participants’ assessments of their contemporaries’ morality have not changed over time. For Mastroianni, this means that the perception of moral decline is erroneous or that “it’s at least very difficult to find any evidence that this moral decline has happened”.

Melissa Wheeler, an ethics researcher at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, praised the robustness of the data, noting that it included “responses from millions of archival data points over decades” and a series of well-powered experiments that confirm the findings.

Widespread pessimism

The fact that US residents of all types perceived declining morality surprised psychologist Liane Young, head of the Morality Lab at Boston College in Massachusetts, who was not involved with the study. “That pessimism about human nature is pretty common when people are making judgements about those who are not on their side, on their team. What’s interesting is that this bias seems to be more pervasive and doesn’t seem to be rooted in intergroup bias.”

So why do people think there is this decay? The authors speculate that it has to do with factors such as biased memory; negative memories tend to fade faster than positive ones.

Mastroianni says that the illusion of moral decline might have important societal and even political consequences. For example, a 2015 survey² cited in his paper found that 76% of people in the United States agreed that “‘addressing the moral breakdown of the country’ should be a high priority for their government” — a view that could affect voting choices.

“The challenge”, Wheeler points out, “will be in getting people to accept that they hold this illusion, which is so prominent and widely held.”