People often feel nostalgia for the past, claiming that previous times were better. A common view is that general human goodness and morality are declining — people are less kind, more selfish, and less moral than they were in the past. It’s as if they view the past as a golden age while our current society is heading towards a dystopian future like in Mad Max.

But is this true? Is morality declining?

A paper published in the journal Nature by Daniel Gilbert of Harvard and Adam M. Mastroianni of Columbia University addressed this issue by digging into three questions:

1. Do most people think morality has declined?
2. Are they correct? Has morality declined? and
3. If they are wrong and morality is not declining, why do people think it is?

Do Most People Think Morality Has Declined?

Yes. The researchers examined 177 studies that surveyed over 220,000 Americans and found that in 84% of the surveys, most respondents thought that morality had declined. Here are some examples one of the researchers, Adam Mastroianni, shared on his blog:

And the same pattern happens globally: surveys of over 350,000 people in 59 countries found that a majority of people think that morality is declining.

The researchers ran their own studies and found some interesting things:

• Both young and old people think morality is declining.
• Conservatives think morality is declining more than liberals do, but liberals also think that morality is declining.
• When asked to rate the morality of people during the current year, when the respondent was age 20 and for the year they were born, most respondents thought that morality has been declining for their entire lifetimes.

Adam Mastroianni notes: “So now it really really seems like people all over the world believe that people in general are less fundamentally good than they used to be.  They think this decline has been going on their whole lives, and that it’s still going on today. And that belief cuts across every demographic group.”

But Has Morality Actually Declined?

The researchers admit that measuring morality is challenging. Adam Mastroianni notes, “It’s not like we have moral thermometers that have been taking measurement for decades, nor can we drill cores out of Arctic ice to determine ancient levels of morality.” 

Yet, on most objective measures, things are better now than in the past. In the Nature paper, the researchers note:

“Societies keep (or at least leave) reasonably good records of extremely immoral behavior 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 centuries. 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.”

However, the researchers note that when people think of morality, they might not think about crime rates or “slaughter and conquest.” Maybe what people think about when they ponder moral decline is what happens in their daily lives. Are their “contemporaries less honest and kind than they used to be?” Do people treat each other with respect? Are neighbors generous and helpful? Do “people offer their seats to an elderly person, give directions to a lost tourist, or help their neighbor fix a fence?” Things like that.

On this basis, morality doesn’t seem to be declining either. The researchers examined 107 studies involving over 4.4 million people across a 55-year time span (1965 – 2020) that asked questions related to morality like: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” and “Are people generally helpful, or are they looking out for themselves?” and “In the past month, have you helped a stranger who needed help?” These 107 studies found that there was no material change in people’s answers over the 55-year period. In other words, when looking concurrently, people have had about the same view of the morality of society — it’s been stable for over five decades.

Plus, the researchers examined studies performed by economists about how people cooperate or share. These studies, spanning the period of 1956 to 2017, found that rates of cooperation and goodheartedness increased by about 10%. In other words, people today are less selfish on average than they were a generation or two ago (at least according to economists).

Why Do People Perceive a Moral Decline?

This presents an interesting dialectical situation: people think morality is declining while measures of morality have remained constant or have improved. So why do people tend to perceive morality as declining?

While there are many possible reasons, the researchers think that it is a combination of two psychological theories that are the most likely explanation for the effect:

1. Biased exposure: where “people pay disproportionate attention to negative information,” and negatively biased media reports fan its flames (the “if it bleeds, it leads” effect) and

2. Biased memory: the phenomenon where “the negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information.” In other words, when recalling the past, negative events are more likely to be forgotten, and their emotional impact is muted. (More on that in this IFOD: Nothing is as good or bad as it seems)

These effects combine to make the past look rosier than the present. As noted in the paper, “Specifically, biased exposure to information about current morality may make the present seem like a moral wasteland, biased memory for information about past morality may make the past seem like a moral wonderland and when people in a wasteland remember being in a wonderland, they may naturally conclude that the landscape has changed.”

The researchers tested this theory of why people think morality is declining with multiple experiments that supported it. Interestingly, two findings that came out of these experiments were:

First, people perceive declining morality as happening mainly for people outside their group. When the researchers asked participants about people they know personally, they said that “individuals they’ve known for the past 15 years are more moral today.”

Second, people see morality declining for only their lifetimes. Eras before our births seem more immoral. This makes sense. You can think back to women not having the vote, slavery, and the treatment of Native Americans by our ancestors, to name a few, as examples of times of lower moral standing.

Conclusion in a Nutshell

Co-author Adam Mastroianni summarized their findings as follows:

1. Do people, in general, think morality has declined? Yes.
2. Are they right about that? Probably not.
3. So why do they think it? Could be lots of reasons, and biased memory plus biased exposure might be one of them.