How kind, honest, nice, and good would you say people are today?
How kind, honest, nice, and good would you say they were when you were 20 years old?
What about when you were born?
A recent study found evidence that people tend to think that individual morality has been declining over time, but only since they were born. In other words, people believe that others have become more immoral throughout their own lifetime.
However, there are reasons to think that this perception of moral decline is an illusion: that the degree to which people are kind, honest, nice, and good is actually either stable or improving. This means the illusion of moral decline appears to be a bias in our thinking! We as humans appear to be disposed to seeing moral decline where there is none, and understanding this can help you be less fooled by it. In this article, we explore how this bias was systematically examined and the replication study we conducted to confirm or disconfirm those findings.
As part of our Transparent Replications project, which runs replications of psychology papers from top journals shortly after they are published, we ran a replication of the recent study that examined this illusion. What do you think we found? Did the original findings replicate? Read on to find out!
Studying the Illusion of Moral Decline
The original study made two key predictions:
For periods during the participants' lifetimes, they would perceive a moral decline, believing people today are morally worse than in the past.
For periods before the participants were born, their perceptions of moral decline would decrease, disappear, or even reverse compared to periods within their lifetimes.
The researchers behind the original study made these predictions after reflecting on two factors:
People are typically exposed to more negative information about current-day individuals than about past individuals (e.g., through the media).
People have weaker emotional responses to negative events from the past than positive events from the past, and even have a tendency to start feeling positively about events that were experienced as negative at the time they were happening. These phenomena are called the ‘fading affect bias’ - you might have felt this bias if you’ve ever found yourself being nostalgic for a time which you know you experienced as difficult when you were in it.
The original study (with 387 participants) and our replication (with 533 participants, run using Positly, the study participant recruitment platform, which is a sister project of ours) tested these predictions in the same way: participants from lots of different age groups, between 18 and 69 years old, were recruited and told “In this study, we’ll ask you how kind, honest, nice, and good people were at various points in time. If you’re not sure or you weren’t alive at that time, that’s okay, just give your best guess.” Then, they were asked to report how “kind, honest, nice, and good” people were at five different timepoints:
today
around the year the participant turned 20
around the year the participant was born
around 20 years before the participant was born
around 40 years before the participant was born
Kindness, honesty, niceness, and goodness are taken to be an evaluation of an individual’s degree of morality. Participants were asked to rate this on a scale from 1 to 7:
The results original study and our replication both found that participants rated people as:
Less moral today than 20 years after the participant’s birth.
Less moral 20 years after the participant's birth than when the participant was born.
Equivalently moral when the participant was born and 20 years before.
The original study didn't find statistically significant evidence for any kind of relation (whether that be similarity or difference) between people’s perceptions of how moral people were 20 years before participants’ birth vs 40 years before participants’ birth. However, our study found that people rated morality as the same for both time periods.
Here’s a violin plot of our results, showing how moral study participants perceived people to be different numbers of years before and after their birth:
Large black dots represent participants’ average ratings. Error bars represent
95% confidence intervals. Small gray dots represent each individual rating.
Curved lines show the distributions of individual ratings. Left-to-right position
of gray points is random within each variable - this jitter is just to make the
number of points in each vertical region more visible.
As in the original paper, we also tested to see whether there were any relationships between perceptions of moral decline and:
Political ideology
Parental status
Age
Gender
Race/ethnicity
Educational attainment
Political ideology
The original study found a statistically significant effect of political ideology such that more conservative participants perceived more moral decline. Our replication found the same result.
Parental Status
The original study did not find a statistically significant effect of parental status. However, our replication found a significant (albeit small) effect such that parents perceived more moral decline than non-parents.
Age
The original study found a statistically significant effect of age such that older people perceived more moral decline (i.e., a larger negative difference between today and birth year morality ratings). However, the original paper argued that this was because the number of years between today and birth year was larger for older participants.
Our replication did not find a statistically significant effect of age, so the reason why it occurred in the original study is likely unimportant.
Race/Ethnicity and Educational Attainment
Neither the original study nor our replication found a statistically significant effect of race/ethnicity (when the variable is dummy coded with White as the comparison group) or educational attainment.
Gender
The original study also did not find a statistically significant effect of gender. Our replication study also found no effect of gender when comparing male and female participants, and the small number of participants selecting "other" for gender meant we could not meaningfully interpret results for that group.
Is This An Illusion?
The results above indicate that people (on average) believe that individual morality is in decline; that people are less kind, honest, nice, and good to each other than they used to be. The authors of the original paper called this “the illusion of moral decline”, but this is only an illusion if that belief is false. So, is it?
Our replication study did not look into this, but the authors of the original paper give some reasons for thinking so.
First, they point out that historical records of extremely immoral behaviors (such as murder, sexual assault, slavery, conquest, and so on) indicate that those behaviors have declined significantly.
Second, they searched databases of survey research and found 107 questions that were asked to ~4.5 million people over 55 years (between 1965 and 2020) that:
Related to an aspect of morality at the time
Were asked to people at least twice and at least 10 years apart
The questions asked included things like:
“How would you rate the overall state of moral values in this country today?”
“Do you feel safe walking alone at night in the city or area where you live?”
“[In the last month, have you] helped a stranger or someone you didn't know who needed help?”
“Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?”
“During the past 12 months, have you let a stranger go ahead of you in line?”
After some statistical analysis, the results were clear: people's views on current morality appear to have remained stable over time. The year the question was asked of someone explained less than 0.3% of the differences in responses on average, and almost always less than 1%.
As the authors of the study say, “The subjective measures we analysed are not definitive, of course, but they strongly suggest that the widespread perception of moral decline is an illusion.”
The results of these studies offer a reason for optimism. Despite the pervasive belief in a moral decline, evidence suggests that human behavior has not deteriorated as feared. These studies have not determined the reasons why this illusion exists, but they have given suggestions and provided evidence that it does.
This illusion appears to be another bias in our thinking. We as humans appear to be disposed to seeing moral decline where there is none. If you want to take your thoughts about moral biases even further, why not try out our tool about the emotional obstacles to doing good. If you want to make the world a better place, emotions can both help and hinder your progress. Use this tool to help you better understand and overcome these challenges!