The letter is addressed to the editor-in-chief of Grand Forks Heraldthe main daily newspaper distributed between North Dakota and Minnesota, and published on its website. It is signed by a reader: “A few weeks have passed since the election, and I am deeply sad. The election of Donald Trump is emblematic of the abrupt moral decline of our society. There was a time in America when character and integrity mattered – that’s no longer the case.”
“Moral decline”: undoubtedly one of the most tenacious sea serpents in public debate, despite the resounding success of bestsellers such as The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), in which cognitive psychologist and Harvard professor Steven Pinker documented the decline of violence (from wars to homicides to the treatment of homosexuals or ethnic minorities) throughout history. Across the Atlantic, the issue of moral values seems so burning that even the famous editorialist of New York TimesDavid Brooks, was interested in it last year through the work How to Know a Person (2023), in which he lamented that American society had “failed to teach the skills and cultivate the desire to treat others with kindness, generosity, and respect.” A survey carried out by the American Gallup Institute has also shown in 2023 that no less than 83% of Americans actually believe that moral values are deteriorating – Republicans (97%) and progressives (73%). Worse: according to the institute, Americans’ assessment of the state of moral values and their vision of morality in the future were at their most negative points in twenty-two years of measurement… But this famous decline exists he really?
Global phenomenon
Two researchers, Adam Mastroianni (Columbia Business School) and Daniel Gilbert (Harvard), looked into this question in a study published in 2023 within the prestigious journal Nature. For anyone who considers that a globally widespread belief certainly reflects a reality, this investigation has all the makings of a lesson. Because if the researchers have shown that this impression of decline is in reality shared internationally and has been for at least seventy years – they relied on data from surveys carried out in more than 60 countries between 1949 and 2021, including United States and France – what follows, on the contrary, marks the end of a myth.
By compiling data from 140 surveys since the 1970s, probing the state current of morality (which represents a sample of 12 million individuals), researchers observed a stagnation in the level of morality reported. And this, regardless of the wording of the question (“were you treated with respect today?”, “how do you estimate the state of moral values in your country today?”, “people are are they generally willing to help?”).
“We therefore had on the one hand individuals believing that moral values continued to deteriorate compared to the past. And on the other hand, a stagnation in the level of morality reported in the present, over around fifty years, summarizes Adam Mastroianni , now an independent researcher and author of the bloc Experimental History (Substack) from L’Express. If there had truly been a moral decline over time, respondents should have been increasingly critical of the state of moral values currentyear after year. But the trend remained unchanged! This suggests that this change that people think has happened has not happened. It’s an illusion.”
Psychological biases
In their study, the researchers put forward two psychological explanations. First, the impact of “biased information exposure”, which can lead individuals to pay disproportionate attention to negative information. However, as the authors point out, “numerous studies have shown that human beings are particularly likely to seek out and pay attention to negative information about others, and the mass media lends itself to this tendency by highlighting disproportionate focus on people who behave badly So, individuals. may encounter more negative information than positive information about the morality of “people in general”, and this “biased exposure effect” may help explain why people think current morality is relatively low.
Adam Mastroianni, independent researcher
Then, the study points to the role of another bias, this time affecting memory: namely that the negativity of negative information fades more quickly than the positivity of positive information. Simply put, when we remember positive and negative events from the past, negative events are more likely to be forgotten. “Combined, these two phenomena can produce an illusion of moral decline. Specifically, biased exposure to information about current morality can make the present seem like a moral desert, while biased memory for information about current morality “past morality can give the impression that the past was a moral wonderland,” the authors conclude. Speaking to L’Express, Adam Mastroianni takes the example of the memory of George W. Bush. “Despite the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, the lies, many Americans seem to keep the memory of a kind old grandfather. They have forgotten the negative , quite simply.”
If no one is spared from such biases, how can we explain, then, that Democrats (but also younger people) demonstrate a less marked belief in moral decline than conservatives or older people? “It is possible that Democrats, because they are more sensitive to social progress like combating racism or sexism, have the impression that things are slightly different from the past than conservatives, who focus on other subjects. But in any case, even the most fervent democrats also perceive this moral decline. As for the elderly, a simple mathematical illusion: “these individuals have simply lived longer than others and have therefore benefited more from this memory bias which filters negative information. But if you report the responses obtained from young people and older people to their lifespan, you actually get the same estimate of the rate of decline per year.
Concrete consequences
Still, an illusion can have concrete consequences. In their study, the researchers noted that in 2015, 76% of Americans agreed that “addressing the moral collapse of the country” should be a top priority for their government. “The United States faces many well-documented problems, from climate change and terrorism to racial injustice and economic inequality, and yet most Americans believe their government should devote scarce resources to reversal of an imaginary trend”, worry the authors. Not to mention the possible behavioral implications. “The illusion of moral decline may be one of the reasons why people do not depend as much as they could on the kindness of strangers,” they further judge. At L’Express, Adam Mastroianni points out another risk. “If you worry about moral decline, you may also become dangerously susceptible to manipulation by political actors who stoke this feeling, and promise to fix the problem if they come to power. That is, ultimately, the heart of Donald Trump’s policies: “Make America Great Again.
We are initially surprised when Adam Mastroianni explains that trying to counter this illusion is not necessarily desirable. “Obviously, I wish we could recalibrate our minds to avoid falling into this trap. But at the same time, the two biases primarily responsible for this illusion are useful in other aspects of our lives! If we sought to take action on them, we could actually end up in a much worse situation.” The researcher cites memory bias which, because it favors positive memories over negative ones over time, helps “make life bearable”.
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