Sleep and Creativity//moral decline is an illusion

Participants in the foregoing studies believed that morality has declined, and they believed this in every decade and in every nation we studied. They believed the decline began somewhere around the time they were born, regardless of when that was, and they believed it continues to this day. They believed the decline was a result both of individuals becoming less moral as they move through time and of the replacement of more moral people by less moral people. And they believed that the people they personally know and the people who lived before they did are exceptions to this rule. About all these things, they were almost certainly mistaken. One reason they may have held these mistaken beliefs is that they may typically have encountered more negative than positive information about the morality of contemporaries whom they did not personally know, and the negative information may have faded more quickly from memory or lost its emotional impact more quickly than the positive information did, leading them to believe that people today are not as kind, nice, honest or good as once upon a time they were.

Like all studies, ours have limitations. For example, studies 1 and 4 made use of archival data that were not collected for the purposes to which we put them and that were therefore less than ideal. For example, some of the items we analysed asked participants for their perceptions of changes in ‘moral values’ without specifying what those values were, some failed to specify the time in the past to which the present was to be compared, and some contained ambiguous wording that was not optimal for extracting accurate measures of people’s perceptions of moral decline. Moreover, all the items asked participants about the presence or absence of moral decline rather than asking them to rate the level of morality of people in both the present and the past. These limitations were addressed by studies 2a–c, but these studies had limitations of their own (for example, all participants were from the United States). And although studies 5a–b demonstrated the viability of the BEAM mechanism, they do not tell us whether it was the cause of the illusion of moral decline that our other studies documented.

With that said, the illusion of moral decline seems to be a robust phenomenon that may have troubling consequences. For example, in 2015, 76% of US Americans agreed that “addressing the moral breakdown of the country” should be a high priority for their government²⁷. The United States faces many well-documented problems, from climate change and terrorism to racial injustice and economic inequality—and yet, most US Americans believe their government should devote scarce resources to reversing an imaginary trend. The belief that everyday morality is on the wane may also affect people’s interpersonal behaviour. For example, research shows that people are reluctant to seek the aid and comfort of those whom they do not know because they underestimate how willingly those people would provide it^4,28,29. The illusion of moral decline may be one of the reasons people do not depend as much as they might on the kindness of strangers—an act that might well ameliorate the illusion itself. The illusion of moral decline may also leave people dangerously susceptible to manipulation by bad actors. Research shows that people are especially influenced by ‘dynamic norms’, which are perceived changes in customary ways of behaving⁵. If low morality is a cause for concern, then declining morality may be a veritable call to arms, and leaders who promise to halt that illusory slide—to “make America great again”, as it were—may have outsized appeal. Our studies indicate that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. Achieving a better understanding of this phenomenon would seem a timely task.