We really aren't losing our morals, researchers say

We've heard the arguments: Civil discourse is dead. Social media has made us all self-obsessed. People are meaner and ruder than ever.

With constant news of the war in Ukraine, gun violence, hate crimes and inequality, every day seems to bring new evidence that humanity is plunging toward moral bankruptcy.

But is it?

Research by psychologists Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert says this is a powerful and persistent illusion.

For decades, when people around the world have been asked to compare the morals of the present day with those of the past, they have, overwhelmingly, reported that morals are deteriorating. But when surveys asked about current morality, participant responses remained relatively stable across time — suggesting this perception of decline is false.

"This intense feeling we get that all this nastiness that we see today is new — that is an illusion," said Mastroianni, lead author on the paper, which was published recently in Nature. "The fact that it feels like you know [that morals have declined] is not good evidence that you do know."

That isn't meant to undermine the very real crises society faces, he said.

John Doris, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, said he is "favorably disposed" to the study, though the findings aren't surprising. "A poet once said: 'The world is always ending,'" he wrote in an email.

An unending fall

This illusion of moral decline, as the researchers call it, has lasting resonance.

Two thousand years ago, Roman historian Livy bemoaned the "sinking of the foundations of morality" that brought the "dark dawning of our modern day," the researchers write. It's the kind of longing for the past that politicians try to tap into on the campaign trail — and the kind of intergenerational grievance that certain family members air at dinner tables and gatherings.

The tendency to idealize the past has long irked Mastroianni.

To debunk this reasoning, Mastroianni looked at 70 years' worth of archival questions or prompts from major survey research providers — including Pew, Gallup and publications such as the Economist and the Wall Street Journal — that asked some 220,000 Americans whether and how they believed that people's morality had shifted over time.

On about 84 % of the questions, the majority of Americans said morality had declined. Survey responses in 59 other countries had similar findings, he found. And yet, when Mastroianni looked at other survey questions from 1965 to 2020, which asked 4.5 million respondents to evaluate current morality, their responses appeared stable, giving little support to the idea that morality is in a downward spiral.

"People all over the world believe that morality has declined, and they have believed this for as long as researchers have been asking them about it," Mastroianni and Gilbert wrote in the paper.

The researchers also asked their own participants to compare present morality with the past and found that they were caught up in the same illusion. Their perceptions were slightly influenced by political leanings and age — conservatives and older people tended to perceive more moral decline — but the liberal and younger participants were vulnerable to the same line of thinking.

While there are several possible reasons for this illusion, Mastroianni suggests, it may be the result of deeply held biases.

The consequences can be significant.

Liane Young, a moral psychologist at Boston College, notes that perception of others' morals can influence our own.

"If I think that the morality of folks around me is declining, then my pessimism might lead me to lower my own moral standards," she said.

Mastroianni and Gilbert write that such thinking could keep people from speaking with strangers or relying on their kindness, "an act that might well ameliorate the illusion itself."

Interestingly, though, the researchers found a way to potentially reduce the illusion: asking people to think about the morality of individuals in their own lives.