Rather, he was remarking on the ways in which ordinary people behave in their daily lives. But like most social observers, Livy was not remarking on the moral extremes-on the rare heroic deed or occasional heinous crime that few people ever perform or experience. Morality refers primarily to people’s treatment of each other 8, which ranges from the altruistic 9 to the barbaric 10. Fourth and finally, we describe tests of a simple psychological mechanism that can produce the illusion of moral decline and can predict some of the circumstances under which it will be attenuated, eliminated or reversed (for example, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Third, we show that people’s reports of the current morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, which strongly suggests that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Second, we show that people attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. First, we show that people in at least 60 nations do indeed believe that morality is declining, and that they have believed this for at least 70 years. We provide evidence for the latter possibility. The other possibility is that the perception of moral decline is a psychological illusion to which people all over the world and throughout history have been susceptible. Why have so many different people in so many different times and places been convinced that their fellow citizens are now less moral than they once were? One possibility is that morality has, in fact, been declining worldwide for millennia-declining so steadily and so precipitously that people in every era have been able to observe that decline in the brief span of a human lifetime. From ancient to modern times, social observers have often lamented the ugly turns their societies have taken, and have often suggested that a recent decline in morality-in kindness, honesty and basic human decency-was among the causes 2, 7. But as apt as this description of our times may seem, it was written more than 2,000 years ago by the historian Livy, who was bemoaning the declining morality of his fellow Roman citizens. Some observers 6 claim that “the process of our moral decline” began with the “sinking of the foundations of morality” and proceeded to “the final collapse of the whole edifice”, which brought us “finally to the dark dawning of our modern day, in which we can neither bear our immoralities nor face the remedies needed to cure them”. The social fabric appears to be unravelling: civility seems like an old-fashioned habit, honesty like an optional exercise and trust like the relic of another time. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources 3, the underuse of social support 4 and social influence 5. Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. 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). 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. 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. Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining 1, 2.
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