I wonder whether the perceived “lack of morality” that people feel is associated with the decline of religion (as Nietzsche famously said, God is Dead). Without that external rule of religion, people may still be moral enough not to mug others/do bad things that the poll questions asked, but their actions may not fully align with *another* individual. And so to this other individual, the world is less moral. (Note this other individual doesn’t need to be religious either).
I completely agree that this study tells you more about the researchers’ bias rather than the participants’ bias. There is definitely shoehorning of findings, based on shaky assumptions of what these polls are actually reporting.
Lee Kuan Yew (I think? - cant find it now) told a story about visiting London after the war and finding a newspaper stand in a train station with no one attending it. The way it worked was you took a paper from the pile and put your money in the pot, and if there was theft of the money sometimes it was low enough that this worked out as a way to run a business.
The idea of trying that today is ludicrous. Since I first heard it I’ve always thought of this story as an kind of existence proof for the idea that _something_ has changed.
I am reminded of this from Mark Twain: "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."
Our values & ideas always go from indistinct and adaptable when we are young to concrete and rigid as we grow. Does not matter whether it is moral values or technological concepts or intelligence etc., I find we flip from being accepting of other views when we are young to judging other views against our own as we grow older.
There were times I used to wonder "Is it me or the world around me which is changing?" But then I realised, it is both, "I" and "the world" around me mutates, it is just that I mutated with the world when I was young and hence did not see the difference, but as I grew old I fell out of sync with the mutation which caused me to see the change & judge it.
So, irrespective of what the actual is, we always think that things in our childhood were much better and has degraded over time.
Nice post. By the way, violent crime reported is more than double since 1960, but actual murders are up only 20%. That difference may be revealing.
Measures of "violent crime" can pick up changes in whether people feel it's worthwhile to report crime to police, in which case more reports can sometimes match to *less* actual crime.
For this reason, historians prefer to track homicides over time, as murder is almost always reported.
When I see murders up 1.2x, and a 2.5x increase of "violent crimes," one immediate hypothesis is "actually, there aren't 2.5x more violent crimes, people these days just report more of the crime that happens to police."
An exact opposite hypothesis would be "the increase in violent crime is real, and there would be a lot more murders, too, except that modern medicine keeps the assault victims alive and it's not murder if you don't die."
A third sideways hypothesis would be "there aren't even more attempted murders, just more handguns to attack with instead of knives, so the same level of violence as in 1960 is getting 20% more people actually killed."
Which is right? I don't know. But I do know the chart can't tell you!
So "beware the man of one chart" just like you would "beware the man of one study."
I'm too eager to get this comment out to really check thoroughly, first... (edit: well that bit me — dunno how many damn words were autocorrected to the wrong goddamn form, initially...)
...but it looks to me like you're right about the statistical methods used. That's not how I'd do it, I think.
The "Bayesian" method they use is interesting, but as the documentation on it (that is, on the "Bayesian RoPE" method using the Highest [Probability] Density Interval™) takes ESPECIAL CARE! to caution the would-be user that defining the ROPE ("region of practical equivalence" — the range wherein the parameter-of-interest's values are "negligible" / "of negligible magnitude") offers an unfortunate latitude to the researcher.
That is: both the range itself *and* the choice of units are left to the user's judgment, with no clear Best And Objective Way to use as a bright-line distinction — and the choice of units can determine whether the *same exact data* is counted as confirming the null or no.
Man, this is just *made* for Garden-of-Forking-Paths–ing (GoFPing?) until you've got a satisfying conclusion!
That's in theory, anyway. In this particular case, maybe they actually did pick common-sensical values for the "negligible effect" range (RoPE)
>(think I’m strawmanning? Read the last paragraph of the Discussion section)
My god, you're not kidding. Quoting it for anyone else:
>>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.
...Also, I'm surprised you didn't link this back to "Social Psychology is a Flamethrower"; this is clearly some choice napalm.
If you think of morality as a magnitude (which I think is the right way of thinking about it) then any move away from what you think of is right is a decline. You can't super not-cheat-on-your-wife. So its a bit of a silly question. If morality hasn't declined then it hasn't changed. But it clearly has changed.
To biological creatures, evolutionary pressures are God. Therefore, since evolutionary pressures are inconsistent across place and time, God is always a creature of the moment, enforcing his will most brutally on yesterday's favorite children. The fundamental act of morality is patricide, our parents, demons.
Insofar as the direction of travel for morality is driven by young people, an aging society would feel increasingly alienated from the moral trajectory simply on account of ratios of young to old.
Expanding on what you briefly mentioned about wealth, I think you could divide morality into roughly two categories:
A) "be a good Roman" morality- meaning acting based on feelings of duty/ honor to do hard/ badass/ valuable things that benefit others/ make you look cool. This is more Nietszchean.
B) "don't be a nazi" morality- meaning being careful to not accidentally act on evil morals and serve some super villain dutifully in a way you think is righteous but actually is totally not. This is more like Socrates or something.
Morals in society during times of peace/ prosperity will generally be drifting in the "don't be a Nazi" direction for morality. Judge not that ye be not judged, stop to think before marching off to war, etc. I'd argue we're a lot better at "don't be a Nazi" morality in 2023 than we were in 1949, in spite of all the complaints about liberals being speech Nazis/ alt right people being literal Nazis. People in general are probably much more open minded, accepting, not racist, not sexist, empathic, and humble with regards to morality than they were then.
But "don't be a Nazi" morality is negatively correlated with "be a good Roman" morality. So since 1949 we've also gotten significantly less good at what you call "1940s morality." And while 1940s morality and Livy's model for morality are much different, they both have in common that they are calling people to behave according to specific norms, calling on people to live up to a specific model for good citizenship that involves a lot more than just "being chill." During times of war or economic hardship, "be a good Roman" morality probably improves, while "don't be a Nazi" morality probably erodes.
So this seemingly constant attitude that morality is in decline could on some level simply reflect this conflict between two opposing things that we happen to call "morality." Most of the time, civilizations slowly get more prosperous, leading to things shifting in a "don't be a Nazi" direction. But we focus on the negative and see how everyone is being less good Romans- being more directionless, apathetic, etc. Then a war breaks out and patriotic fervor explodes out of nowhere, labor force participation rates soar, the martial virtues that Livy loves so much increase. But as this happens, we can't help but notice that humans are murdering eachother like animals, and all kinds of other atrocities are occurring. Clearly morality must be in decline, it's the end of the world. So perhaps the only time societies in general feel like morality is improving is right after a victorious war, when the soldiers come home and stop killing people, taking their disciplined habits and conformist haircuts with them. At these moments both type A morality and type B morality can seemingly both be at new heights at the same time. But most of the time it will seem like the world is getting either more Nazi or more apathetic.
I suspect quite a few of the differences reflect changes in the distribution, most people have got far less violent, you are far less likely to be attacked by your spouse, parent, boss, cops, teacher, customers in your local pub but 15-30 year old males linked to the drugs trade have got much violent and that explain all of the increase in violence.
I am not sure I follow all of the arguments in this post. Just to pick on one aspect: Do we really suspect that people have the same inclination to report violent crimes (in particular rape) today as compared to 50 years ago? Research seems to document that more rapes are being reported in recent years, compared to 50 years ago. Hence, any uncritical referral to general violent crime rates is just going to be...biased.
Given that people complaining about moral decline seems to happen in most time periods, should we think that moral progress/regress and moral drift have been constant or moving in tandem for that entire time? Or perhaps my presumption that complaints of moral decline are universal is wrong?
This reminded me of Schwitzgebel's work (http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/BehEth-140123a.htm) aiming to show that ethicists were not more moral than others. But then you look at their measures and they are things like: "Ethics books were more likely to be missing than other philosophy books: 8.5% of ethics books that were off the shelf were missing or more than one year overdue, vs. 5.7% of non-ethics books, a risk ratio of about 1.5 to 1 (66/778 vs. 52/910, CI for difference +0.3% to +5.2% , Z = 2.2, p = .03)."
Trying to present quotes from Roman Empire-perdiod historians as evidence that moral decline is all alarmism and illusions is particularly ironic, when Rome is a canonical example that a civilization can spoil, decay, and collapse. One can almost conclude that we're dealing with New Dark Age cheerleaders.
From where I sit, "morality" consists of a set of rules that Good People (TM) impose on everyone else. Women should be subordinate to men. Blacks should be subordinate to whites. Particular types of clothing should be worn, indicating one's status in the social hierarchy. Sexual activity must be done in the correct way, with the correct person. Everyone should participate in religious rituals. Etc. etc. somewhat ad nauseam.
I don't think my use of this term is especially unusual in my generation - just about everyone who felt they were should-on by the Religious Reich tended to adopt this usage. We remember the Moral Majority (TM), and what it claimed was "moral".
Perhaps some of my peers have mellowed with age. But if I'd been responding to any such survey, the results would be somewhat "through the looking glass'.
This is also my context for these researchers' ideas of "objective morality". They've picked a set of rules - perhaps less pernicious than those purveyed by the Religious Reich (you do say they appear to be left wing) - and tried to create a metric based on those rules. Unfortunately, there isn't any uncontested set of rules that all will accept, even in a single generation - as you point out for the specifics of their "objective" metric.
Perhaps any attempt to measure people's perceptions of moral trends tends to measure conformity - to what extent does everyone in the society agree on the same shoulds and oughts?
Consider two types of violators of moral rules:
- the sinner violates rules that they agree with, or at least give lip service to. They conceal their sin if possible, and repent when caught.
- the outsider violates rules that they don't agree with. They are more likely to argue that your rules are insane than to conceal their activities.
I have no non-anecdotal evidence, but I strongly suspect that outsider behaviour counts *much* more than sinner behaviour in people's perceptions of what they see as immorality. And this is particularly true when the outsiders are right there in your face, claiming equal or higher status, rather than in some benighted foreign territory.
And that's what we have in the US - two or more separate solitudes that can't help but see each others' conflicting rules and behaviour.
When more than 50% of the country doesn't think my rules should be imposed, *whichever set I believe in*, it sure looks like moral decline, at least if I believe there was a recent time (the 1950s?) when there was something a bit more like majority agreement.
I'm inclined to think of this in terms of personal virtue, and it strikes me that there is a component to one's moral character that is independent of their moral beliefs. Let's go back to Rome again and pick some noteworthy historical figures as examples, say Cato the Younger and Sulla, and think about their moral character. The reception of Sulla ranged from a monster among his political enemies to being treated with great embarrassment even among his fellow Optimates. In contrast, while Cato has received criticism for being too uncompromising in all ages, few would dispute his moral integrity, both then and now. And that's despite the fact that he was championing the sort of values that would e.g. have husbands kill their wives if caught drinking.
I would suggest that there's two components to one's morality: the ethical theory that concerns oughts and ought-nots (and is in itself composed of purely arbitrary or at best contextual mores like what is an appropriate way to dress, and a body of more rigorously constructed morality that is not /objective/ per se, but given assumptions from evolved human psychology, such as that pleasure is better than pain, can be demonstrated by an argument, and that I would argue has grown at least a bit during the course of human history), and then one's virtue, such that a virtuous character is more capable of being their best self in embodying their ethical beliefs. For example, in one time and context a just character might kill their wife for drunkedness, while in another time a just character might fight against police brutality, but the justness of their character is timeless: we are still inclined to think Cato is a paragon of cardinal virtues even though his ethical beliefs have something reprehensible to anyone alive today, and I would like to think that the Romans too could see the virtue in our contemporary moral examplars, even if they would think their cause is beyond misguided.
And this raises a question that I think is in principle answerable although I don't know how: are contemporary people more or less virtuous than people were 10/100/1000/2000 years ago?
Not only is this article below the supposed high standards of Nature but if I recall correctly this messy study is based on Mastroianni's PhD. Social "sciences" are doomed.
Great post! I skipped on the "study" (delete unread), as I was sure not to learn anything new. I never skip Scott as I always learn/think sth. new. My morals should be 1970, and they are in some ways, but maybe not the whole package (church on Sunday was a thing in my family and most others/ divorce, kids-out-of-wedlock did happen rarely/ gay?/ LBTIAR+? kidding).
I do believe our "morals" in post-war Germany improved clearly: people born in my country are usu. acting much more domesticated today than they did in 1986, and from what I read, 1962 was barbaric (google: Straßenschlachten in München 1962 - street-battles weekend after weekend for no apparent reason) . The past is a foreign country. - We do have more people arriving with other Schelling-points nowadays, true. But I see some of their points moving fast.
Yes, an "illusion" because modern we have rejigged morality to mean "all the old stuff our forebears said was sin and dumb cruft like that, we now say is perfectly cromulent and normal". The same way that owning slaves was not immoral in a society where slavery is commonplace and accepted, but only becomes immoral when later generations decide "no, you neither should nor can own slaves". Morality is subjective, a standard we draw up new measures for in every generation. There never was a Golden Age of the past where everyone was perfectly moral; it is up to us to define and create new Golden Ages.
No, not an "illusion" because hell yeah there's a moral decline from the standards of the past. Owning slaves is always wrong because humans are not property, and it doesn't matter if it's a thousand years ago in the Classical world or today in Africa. We've redefined morality to mean "the things we disapprove of" and that can be racism or sexism or transphobia, but the things we like and want to do are now okay - no they're not, not if you cleave to a standard of absolute/objective morality. We flatter ourselves that we are becoming kinder, nicer, more moral by comparing present day to the worst parts of the past (slavery, colonisation) but we omit comparisons with social and civic values we find inconvenient or which would leave us in a worse light.
I'm not sure about these, but I also see other possible explanations.
Could a perceived decline in morality also be related to more and more of our lives being governed by large institutions which, while consisting of moral people, are driven by other incentives, e.g. profit maximizing companies?
Another reason for perceived morality decline could stem from less direct interactions with other people and more of our view of morality being affected by news and social media where immoral actions might be more widely publicized.
So while the average person might be regarded as equally moral as before, society could still be perceived as less moral.
<i>And this is part of why I find the introductory quote by Livy so annoying. What was morality to Livy? Respecting the lares and penates. Performing the ancestral rites. Chastity until marriage, then bearing strong children (Emperor Augustus’ famous law demanded at least three). Martial valor and willingness to die pro patria. Commoners treating patricians with the respect due a noble class, and patricians treating commoners with noblesse oblige.</i>
Since the paper uses violence as a proxy for moral decline, it might be interesting to see how violent Livy's own age was. Of course, we don't have crime statistics for the ancient world, so we can't really say whether personal murders or assaults were more or less common, but political violence was certainly prevalent. Livy was born in 59 BC, and published his first books probably around 27-25 BC. Between the time of his birth and becoming a published author, therefore, Livy would have seen no fewer than *six* civil wars (Caesar's Civil War of 49-45 BC, the War of Mutina 44-43 BC, the Liberators' Civil War 44-42 BC, the Sicilian War of 42-36 BC, the Perusine War 41-40 BC, and the civil war between Octavian and Anthony 32-30 BC). His father's generation (say, the forty years before Livy's birth) would have seen another five or so (depending on whether you consider the Sertorian War as separate from Sulla's second civil war, and whether you count the Third Servile War or not). That's... really quite a large number of civil wars, especially when you consider that Rome had once been unusually politically stable compared to other Mediterranean city-states.
And it's not as if the Roman elite were all upright and virtuous between their bouts of civil warring, either. There are plenty of anecdotes from this era about the corruption and rapacity of Roman governors. Again, we don't have precise statistics, but opportunities for corruption had certainly increased (more distant, wealthy provinces --> more opportunities to extort stuff from the locals with minimal oversight from the government back in Rome), so it's at least probable that the anecdotal evidence does capture a real trend here. And of course, this rapacity didn't remain confined to the provinces, either: Sulla proscribed many citizens simply to get at their wealth, and the Second Triumvirate were notorious for seizing people's land to redistribute to their own soldiers.
On a more personal level, I remember my classical lit professor at university used to argue that there probably was more extra-marital sex in the late Republic than in previous eras. Basically, the big wars of the period (both civil and foreign) took elite men away to the provinces for sometimes years at a time, while their wives and daughters were usually left back in Rome. So you had a large group of upper-class women with both the motive to commit adultery (since the only alternative was going without any sex at all for years on end) and the means to do so (your husband can't easily keep an eye on your behaviour when he's off fighting in Gaul or Syria).
So we have a state trapped in a cycle of political violence, with corrupt and extortionate rulers, and high levels of adultery among the upper classes. That sounds like a situation where someone might reasonably say "Yep, moral standards aren't as high as they used to be."
Also... These sorts of "Here's someone in the past complaining about falling moral standards" anecdotes usually expect the reaser to fill in "...but everything worked out fine anyway, so clearly it was all just a big fuss over nothing." But let's consider what actually happened in the late Republic. On the one hand, the Roman state survived, so I guess things worked out fine in that sense. On the other hand, you had a good century or so of escalating political violence, culminating in the abandonment of Rome's traditional constitution and the imposition of a military dictatorship because that was the only way people could see of stopping the continual civil wars. I think it would be quite reasonable for someone to consider this a pretty bad outcome.
Both the MG paper and the post cite Livy. Funny nobody cites Ecclesiastes "Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this".
I tend to agree that MG are coming in with their own set of biases; if morality is not declining, then people today are as moral as people in the past.
But that also means that people in the past were as moral as people today, and we can look at things like "racial injustice" to see that is not so.
So there can only be no moral decline if people today are *more* moral than people of the past. And if it is possible to improve morally in some areas, then it must also be possible to decline morally in some areas, unless we also propose that the present is becoming more moral on *every* measure.
Also, they slip this little nugget in:
"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."
But "racial injustice" *is* a moral issue, and we may take it from the above that MG feel one where we are *not* more moral, that we have stayed at the same level of immorality as the past (or maybe even got worse) for this measure. And there are calls to devote resources to reversing this trend of "racial injustice".
So what is it? An imaginary trend where we don't need to devote scarce resources to reversing it in the case of "racial injustice", or it's only imaginary when it's about issues conservatives care about but for liberals/progressives, it really is a genuine example of moral decline which must be reversed?
I think it's a mistake to assume that the present situation is normal. While morals may drift somewhat from generation to generation, I think the recent moral upheavals are damn near unprecedented, with views of morality on many issues completely reversing within the space of one or two generations, e.g. from the point where you could be jailed for being homosexual to the point where you can be jailed for saying that homosexuality is wrong. This type of thing just doesn't happen all that often.
Our hypothetical person born in the 1940 who complains about the moral decline he's seen is well aware of the metamoral nature of his complaint -- he understands it's not just that the world has got worse according to his moral rules, but that the world has replaced his moral rules with a whole new set of moral rules. Of course the new set of rules is better by the standard of the new rules and worse by the standard of the old rules.
Okay, because I'm not working for the rest of the day (finished the tasks that needed doing) but I'm up and online so I might as well be doing something, let's have a gander at some of the questions.
(1) "“Is there any area near where you live -- that is, within a mile -- where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?”
Depends. There were "bad" parts of town within a mile that have since improved vastly, and the new "bad" parts are a bit more than a mile away. I absolutely wouldn't be walking alone at night on the weekends when the pubs let out, because a bunch of drunk aggressive idiots getting into fights and petty vandalism aren't too discriminating about not picking on innocent passers-by. But quite likely, 'twas ever thus everywhere.
(2) "They mention in the text that these kinds of questions did better than others; 50% report improved treatment of gay people. But what are the other 50% thinking??! The answer has to be something like “2002 to 2013 is too short a time to measure even extremely large effects that were centered around exactly this period”. But then what does that mean for the rest of their data?"
Re: the other 50% who don't think treatment of gay people improved in 2013, I Googled "gay marriage 2013" and found that was the year the Defence of Marriage Act was struck down by the Supreme Court. So if you're pro-gay rights in 2013, you might well feel "We had to go to the frickin' Supreme Court to get our natural rights because the knuckledraggers passed laws to deprive us of them and *still* state bans on gay marriage are not ruled unconstitutional, improved treatment my sparkly kinky Pride ass":
(3) "Generally speaking, would you say most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?"
Oh, gosh. My native tendencies make Eeyore look like Pollyanna, so I'm heavily in the "Trust but Verify" camp. This has as much to do with "are you an optimist or a pessimist?" as it does with perceptions of moral decline. And when incentives to be backstabbers in order to get ahead are more plentiful and more encouraged ("only losers take the bus") and there is more social atomisation, more fragmentation, less cohesion, the perception of work and the loyalty owed between employer and employee has changed, 'greed is good' and so forth, when you are interacting with more strangers and there are a lot more scammers out there, then yeah, I think it likely that people will perceive "you can't be too careful".
There is probably an element of illusion in the perception of moral decline in that people get more concerned about these things as they get older and have children and eventually become more dependent. Just as there are always older people complaining about how young people don’t know how to speak properly.
But that doesn’t mean there can’t actually be moral decline.
My guess (not having looked in detail) is that the measurement graph is not considered much evidence in favour of anything because, frankly, it's a noisy mess. Sure, the average of those points is dropping, but those points are so all over the place that any change would need to be either super drastic or super sudden to be significant for this sort of analysis... I guess
Really good take on the recent lack of moral decline paper. It would be great to see a detailed response. When reading the original by @Adam Mastroianni a quote from the British historian Dominic Sandbrook came to mind: ‘there are moments in history when disputes about history, identity, symbols, images and so on loom very large. Think about so much of 17th-century politics, for example, when people would die over the wording of a prayer book.’ Those people would think we were immoral beyond belief … https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/13/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-the-culture-wars-but-were-afraid-to-ask
Hypothesis: People think the world is getting worse because, if they grew up in an environment which was reasonably trustworthy *to* *them*, they will think morality is in pretty good shape. Later, they will experience various defections, and think that things are getting worse.
Also (and thanks for underlining changes in morality) people when they're young may be more willing to believe that standards of public morality are being upheld and acquire a more accurate, cynical view with time.
Possibility for recent decades: computers have made defection much easier. I remember when you could pick up a phone, and you would almost certainly be hearing from a person who wanted to talk with you personally, not an advertisement or a fraud or an automated system doing who knows what who just hangs up. People may have been just as willing to do phone scams in the sixties, but the opportunity wasn't there. A steady drizzle of small defections sounds like it isn't being caught by those studies.
I came up with "nostalgia is fond memories of when your knees didn't hurt". Is it possible people think the world is getting worse because their health is getting worse?
What if, hypothetically, you viewed acceptance of sodomy, illegitimacy, and miscegenation etc as... immoral rather than moral? It’s not my view, but it was of many people in the past... For two of them at least, it almost certainly was for the majority throughout human history. What would our ancestors think of us? And how would you convince them they’re wrong?
Scott’s answer makes sense. There is no “true” morality; it’s something we evolved to allow is to cooperate, be part of a society etc, but the particulars are filled in by the culture of our time and place. Accepting it shows you’re a team player. (Not the most precise explanation, but you get my drift hopefully.)
>But when people say “there was more morality back in the good old days”, they rarely mean “in 2000 compared to 2015”. Even if moral decline were constant and linear, 2000 - 2015 might be too short a period for ordinary people to notice the difference.
I've seen multiple commenters who say that gay rights are fine, but that trans rights are a bridge too far and an example of moral degeneracy. If we take them at face value, then they really are yearning for a return to the good old days of the 2000s.
I guess this idea that everyone adopts the zeitgest of their formative years and sees all changes to that as moral decline is actually a pretty good explanation. Empirically I believe it to be true. But there's a follow-up question - *why* do we do this? Why are we so morally inflexible? Why, when I grow old, will I be unable to accept whatever the cool kids believe?
One other thing I think you can do to help make sense of things is swap "social cohesion" for morality.
I think that the way social cohesion tends to work across much of history is there are brief periods where cohesion increases dramatically, followed by long periods of slow decline. The slow decline of social cohesion is often an *increase* in living standards, because folks are making fewer sacrifices and focusing more on their own well-being.
If this toy model reflects reality, it also mechanically explains the way that observers throughout history keep noting apparent moral decline. Every generation except a few rare exceptions live and die within those long periods of slow social decay.
"There is less homicide today then in 1900" (do you mean 1960?) (note 2). In any case, when comparing homicide rates across time, you must control for the fact that medical care has greatly improved across time. A patient with a stab or gunshot wound that would be lethal in earlier times, is now much more often saved on the operation table. Hence fewer homicides, and more (only) violent assault.
This study fits well in the category of "human history started in 1965 and everything before that was basically cavemen and cartoonishly villainous robber barons twirling their moustaches."
The natural comparison would be to look at periods where people claimed moral decline vs moral strength, especially but not exclusively contemporaneously. These periods do in fact exist and the idea that everyone at all times has thought we are in moral decline is something of a myth. If your contemporary morality theory is right you should expect younger people to generally to think we are in a morally strong period. But I don't feel (I know, I know) that's the case today, for example. That the average 20 year old feels America's an especially moral society.
You have several examples even within the last century: The genteel morality of the Edwardian period vs the 1914-1929 excesses. The hardscrabble self-sacrifice of the 1930s to 1950s vs the free love, radicalism, and drugs of the 1960 to the 1970s. And so on. I'd start there to tease out the differences. (Also note, contrary to some political claims, those are not all especially conservative periods.)
This may have to do with the definition of ‘morality’ more than anything else. At least some respondents will include sexual promiscuity and open homosexuality among the immoral behaviors that are increasing, together perhaps with tattoos and obesity. None of these have anything to do with being mugged or not being able to trust others with money, but they are all frowned upon by traditional religions.
> 50% report improved treatment of gay people. But what are the other 50% thinking??!
With the caveat that this is "epistemic standard: stab in the dark", there are certainly "progressive" spaces nowadays where it's forbidden to mention that treatment of minorities has got better, because that would be like claiming that things are maybe not so bad, which would call into question the whole need to burn society to the ground.
There is, of course, a kernel of truth to this idea - homophobia has not completely gone away, and there's still places and jobs and families where being gay means you're going to have a very bad time. I don't disagree that there's still lots of work to be done. But I also think it's both correct and relevant to mention that being gay went from illegal to legal, or that a gay person working in a democratic-leaning large corporation will have a much better workplace environment than a generation ago, at least as far as their orientation is concerned.
"Compared to the past, have things gotten better, worse or stayed the same [regarding] treating African-Americans with respect and courtesy? (2002 vs. 2013)"
Uhm... what if a questioned person does not actually respect the hispanics, gays and/or the African Americans himself? If their mistreatment is framed as a problem, that can get better or worse, presumably depending on social attitudes, therefore some of the respondents must dislike them. Or it would be an unrepresentative poll and therefore worthless. But if a gay-disliking person notices that gays are treated with (from his perspective) undue respect and courtesy, he would have to answer, that the situation got worse. How are those questions not garbage in, garbage out? [maybe I miss some context?]
It's one thing to define moral progress being equivalent with nicer/kinder treatment. But I do not see, how it can even measure by that definition, given that the respondents would not necessarily share that assumption.
I had been assuming that this general study was accurate and fit with my perception of how people experience negativity bias, however I did think of an alternate explanation apart from a critique of the study itself
At some point I switched from a "things are declining" conservative to a "many things are great and getting better and it will all work out" also conservative. But consider the implications if it was a very common belief that things will work out, especially that they will pretty much naturally work out. A society without at least a strong component of people who believed this might be pretty guaranteed to go ahead and experience moral decline
It might be like a driver on a road trip who notices they are 3/4's of the way to the destination, so clearly the belief that taking your foot off the gas will reduce your momentum has not borne out. In this sense negativity bias and accurate assessments of actual moral decline may both exist as a social and personal form of keeping your foot on the gas
"I think (not at all sure!) that this means “the year of the survey explained only 0.6% of the variance in responses”. That sounds tiny. But looking at the graph, the effect looks big. I would file this under “talking about percent variance explained is a known way to make effects sound small”, although I’m not sure about this and I welcome criticism from someone more statistically-literate."
The slope is striking but what's not shown is the literally thousands of data points to show how poorly that slope fits the data generally (aka low variance explained). You can already tell that birth cohort is a pretty big deal, perhaps age of respondent even. Both of these have something to do with "years" but are not the year of response variable. Another source is plain old-fashioned between-participant variability - people within a cohort are more similar to each other than people between cohorts, but even within a cohort, some people are trusting and others aren't. Year of survey response isn't the key factor in explaining variance in trust, other things are.
Hot take without having read the study or even this article yet: people love to quote writers from antiquity writing about moral decline as though that proves that moral decline isn't real. But of course: all of the societies from classical antiquity *really did collapse* centuries ago! And from what little I know about the fall of Rome, it really did have something to do with Rome's inability to produce younger generations with the tenacity and vigor of the earlier ones.
Civilizations have been worrying about moral decline forever, and civilizations have also been collapsing catastrophically forever. It is not obvious to be that these are unrelated.
I'm pleased that Scott's third point matches my comment on their substack at the time, though I used killing one's son as the example rather than one's wife.
"The r^2 statistic of the graph above is listed as '-0.006'." No, the r^2 statistic (which is typically a positive number) is given as 0.008 (on page 56 of the Supplement), and the square root of 0.002 is about 9%. This does not affect your point.
There is a statistic that I find very interesting, not for predicting any decrease of morality (I agree with Scott, morality is clearly not something constant neither in time, places, or social niche. So speaking of change of morality is almost meaningless without much more context) but for predicting social unrest or stability: trust in government. 75->20% is big enough to mean trouble ahead. Especially together with overall trust level (between individuals) going down. My personal impression is that social contract is getting very thin in the western world, and those statistics confirm this impression...
Im afraid my default assumption about social-science research these days is that it is not about discovering truth, it is about establishing truth. Critical Theory Uber Alles.
I think it's useful to imagine the results of a poll that asked, "Do you think your own morality is declining/increasing/staying the same?" I feel like I'm becoming a better person over time, and I suspect that most people would say the same (about themselves, not about me). Yet I would have an extremely hard time coming up with even imaginary statistics to support that perception.
If there are not perceptual biases associated with "morality over time" questions, then people would generally have to be becoming more moral individually while at the same time becoming less moral collectively. That's not impossible; one way to pull that off would be if babies of this generation emerge from the birth canal less moral than babies of previous generations. Seems doubtful.
Another way would be a change in the rate of improvement of personal morality over time: people now improve their morality less rapidly on average now than in the good old days. But that would show up in the responses to the self-improvement question. Also doubtful.
What if people are evaluating the change in morality over time by taking a heuristic shortcut and comparing the morality of old people vs young people? If so, improving personal morality requires old people to be more moral than young people, and the perceptions become consistent.
Here's what I think is actually going on (well, this plus a lot of other stuff): people evaluate society's morality in general by comparing it to their own moral code, which they perceive as superior. The young attribute this difference to societal decay, since what they learn about the past is biased toward noble people doing noble things. The old regard their moral code as the standard, and young people abandoning it represents moral decay in general. The latter is Scott's "moral drift", which is exacerbated by increasing exposure to outgroups.
Outside the debate over what real moral decline has occurred or what that means, I do think that their theory on how people construct their mental model of moral decline based on memory and attention is the interesting part. One thing that struck me from the paper is that it seems you can get a rough “perceived decline per year” that is fairly linear and observable among people at any adult age from questions like “is such and such moral thing better or worse now compared to X years ago”. I don’t think there’s much of any metric that would tell you actual morality has declined in a linear fashion. Crime rates went way up and then back down in your graph and I’d be surprised if any other objectively measurable thing we want to use as a proxy for morality does show a strictly linear change. And it doesn’t seem plausible that morality shift from when someone was born to the present has any sort of constant rate of change either; I would be skeptical of someone who said the shifts in morality from 1960-1970 were the same in magnitude as the shifts from 1990-2000 for example. Your thermostat point is well taken, but the only thing we need to doubt is that people’s apparent linear perception of decline corresponds to reality. And there I do think something like the author’s model of memory and attention is valuable. It proves much less than they want, and maybe “people’s intuitive evaluations of the past relative to the present are based on error-prone psychological processes, which psychologists have said for years, and here’s another area where that seems true” is not exactly headline-worthy, but it does seem valuable.
Since this touches upon my area of expertise, a detail on Livy: The paper that Scott quotes, while very learned, perhaps goes to far on the issue of husbands having the right to kill women who drank. Augustus, Livy's contemporary, actually removed the right of husbands to kill their unfaithful wives altogether. Ancient patriarchal customs like the ius osculi – allowing the male relatives of a married woman to check her breath to see if she had violated a ban against drinking alcohol, which doesn't mean it give them the right to kill her – almost certainly were obsolete early in the republican period. Indeed, they were mocked mere decades after Livy and Augustus, for example by Agrippina the Younger when she asked her then-husband, emperor Claudius, to kiss her as a drinking test.
I don't recall a single example of a woman killed for drinking in Roman history, and tons of recorded examples of drunk women.
I wonder if there's something like, "virtues" in the virtue ethics sense tend to decline, because which ones are relevant shift and the older generation are used to thinking of the virtues they follow as inherent morals. And new morals occur but don't feel like virtues at first.
Or the balance shifts towards consequentialism.
Or the pendulum swings back and forth and sometimes we have new moral movements (let's be vegetarian, let's abolish slavery, let's fund international charities), and sometimes we get "we used to do this and now no-one bothers"
Proof by exhaustion is a very good way to put it. Follows the common psych survey paper trick of throwing a ton of cheap, small MTurk samples at the problem. Can't conclude anything meaningful from any of those studies. Possibly the 700 person one from Prolific is ok; not familiar with them. They make no effort to correct or de-bias anything, because you can't when you're running MTurk studies with 100-300 people each.
Explicitly asking people what they think morality was like over the course of 20 year increments before and after they were born is ludicrous. I have no clue how I would answer those questions, and I doubt anyone else really does either. It's a noisy, unnecessarily complex way to get at the general concept of 'subjectively, do you think things used to be morally better or worse than they are now'. And injecting necessary noise is fundamental to their results.
Worse, they then compound that problem by making a derived indicator based on that noisy, overly-complex set of questions and age ((moral decline in 2020 - moral decline at year of birth) / age), on a sample of 347 from a low-quality source (study 2c). *Then* they run a regression on that indicator. The relevant result is that age doesn't impact perception of moral decline. Aka they don't find a significant result. Because the test is comically under-powered and because the explanatory variable they care about is also in the target variable. Proof by obfuscation is another way to put this. They throw around a ton of unnecessary jargon to hide how simplistic what they're doing actually is.
Study 4 (the big one with archival surveys) is a mess, if I'm reading it correctly. Presumably they have all the individual survey responses, so they're regressing the various year indicators on the outcome. But that doesn't really make sense. They care about individual changes, but there aren't repeat responses. What they do is conceptually identical to regressing on the overall survey average, but with a lot of noise injected. And that explains why they can't see an effect in R2 even when you can see one in mean differences: year is a discrete variable with like 8-12 values at most for all of these studies. The variability within years is nearly always going to be far greater than the variability across years.
Even if you have a clear mean difference across years, if the variance within years is sizable and varies across years significantly (which are always true for survey time-series), or if the trend in the average response isn't strong and linear (which it rarely is for surveys), then you won't see an effect in R2. You will see it in the coefficients for the individual years. Which apparently they also didn't test because they just report on one year coefficient, so they probably used year as a generic trend indicator rather than a factor (testing for 'bigger number make survey change' VS what's the effect of year1, 2, etc.).
What would make more sense (especially because it's what they do earlier in the paper) would be testing bias-corrected mean differences of average survey results for every year-pair for every series. But they'd find effects if they did that and it wouldn't tell the story they want.
This is not good work. But it's a topic people like to speculate about and Dan Gilbert is famous, so good enough for Nature I guess. The short version of all this is that they wanted negative findings, so they picked under-powered samples and used noisy, complex metrics. It's like reverse p-hacking.
I suspect that they find that the year only explains 0.3% of the variance because they use additional predictors, such as birth year. So there is a decline across birth years, but within each cohort the difference is basically 0.
I suspect a trend towards "morality is harm reduction" not because of any Haidt principles but simply because we live in an age where we prefer observable performance measures. I mean folks (including me!) will literally argue online about whether a studio produced movie is "objectively bad," when it's clearly a matter of what you value in media. I wonder if morality is the same - it's values-based, but our age is one where unsupported value judgments are passe, so we have to be able to say "see, this value is important because it reduced this specific thing we all agree is a harm."
While I'm mostly this way too, there are tradeoffs in insisting on this standard like there are tradeoffs in everything. For instance, I'm likely to follow any safety instructions/regulations with my daughter, because in any individual case there's a clear harm for ignoring them vs. a much lower cost for following them. But it's entirely possible that in the aggregate this will teach her that safety is an overriding concern and risk-taking is to be avoided. This could create something like moral decline if spread across a generation - it would be extremely difficult to measure in an unbiased way, but still lead to generally worse QoL.
Note also that I'm still defining "moral decline" as "leading to a generally worse QoL." If I made this kind of argument to religious acquaintances they would say "morality is defined by doing what God wants." They might (depending on how infected with modern sensibility they are) argue that doing what God wants leads necessarily to higher QoL but even if it didn't they wouldn't change their mind about what is moral and what is not.
I expect a Pew poll conducted in 850AD would also have seen agreement with the moral decline hypothesis, just as it would with a 'kids today' question. The proper determinant that changes is 'morals' - which certainly change over time. Having said that, like the respondents in 850AD and those in 2023AD, I do think people pay less attention to moral questions, or are more willing to think they shall get away with transgressions. I suppose I would need a news aggregator from 850AD to see how the mass murders and child abuse cases might compare with today's. I suspect such a non-existent device would prove me to be talking out of my arse! Pinker would suggest so.
Scott, I'm going to unscrupulously pirate this post, edit it, and assign it to my junior high classes as supplementary reading next year. I have to teach the "decline bias" in critical thinking. It's always felt weird but I didn't have time to look up anything. You've now articulated everything I had vague misgivings about.
On the other hand, there's Qoheleth. "Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this."
In section III, I can see a potential case for net zero moral change over time. Say humanity is in a blind-men-and-the-elephant scenario. Each generation is partly right about something and really wrong about something else. Each younger generation figures out what the older ones were Damningly Wrong About. And each older generation sees that the younger ones are Damningly Lax About Something Else. But since the older generation always writes the books and editorials, everyone gets the impression things are declining, and no one notices it's net zero.
Anyway, that's the best I can do for MG. Back to editing your post for junior highers...
This is the Bayesian version of a significance test.
ROPE = region of practical equivalence, in other words a small area around some parameter value which are considered "close." HDI = highest density interval, in other words the measured value of that parameter, but because it's a distribution, they look at a range of values. In particular, they look at the X% of the distribution which gets the most probability into the smallest range; according to https://easystats.github.io/bayestestR/articles/region_of_practical_equivalence.html, X=89 is standard. What it actually means is "there is a high probability that the measured parameter value is very similar to the hypothesized one" which in this case I'm guessing is 0.
"Is this because their methods are too weak to notice not just the improvement in gay rights over the early 2000s, but the improvement in African-Americans’ condition since the 1950s?"
I know this is snarky, but it is almost crime-think to notice that the treatment of African-Americans has improved. All the disparities that existed in the 1950s still exist, with the percentage disparity not that much different. Since poor treatment of African-Americans by American society is the only socially acceptable explanation, the only logical conclusion is that treatment must still be very bad.
"The r^2 statistic of the graph above is listed as -0.006."
r^2 shouldn't be negative. It looks like the coefficient listed is -0.006 and the r^2 is .008. But this is still strange; the r^2 should be much higher. Even with random data at these sample sizes r^2 should be higher than the values listed for the various surveys in Table S3. Does anyone have an idea what's going on? The numbers are so strange that I almost suspect this may be a data entry error?
I think morality rapidly declined when corona hit and several tyrannical impulses kicked in; then some 5% of the population grew a backbone and its in decline again; I think we are better then the romans, but not so sure about the 90s.
So I did what I do with all papers now, I go check to see if the data and code is publicly available, and it is, so bravo on that, but...um, this is just code vomit, for lack of a better term. Like, look at this (https://osf.io/tv5jr), it's ~100 random files created over three years, everything from R code to csv to user/...../source/prop, whatever that is, to powerpoints, and there's an R file which I think just makes one image, "data and code_upload/figure2_code.R", which is just...
Do, do people actually work like this? I mean, I've scanned through this paper, it's not that complicated, I've seen entire data pipelines without this many files. Again, people have different workflows but...but this is really outside anything I've ever seen.
And I'm torn because, on the one hand, I think publicly posting your data and code is one of the most important things academics can do and I want to applaud it here but, also, the entire reason to post your data and code is so other people can double check it and...you can't do this here. I'm not reading all these file and trying to figure out this nightmare workflow of what should be, honestly, like a dozen csvs and a single rmd file.
And I can't tell if this is, like, just a horrible workflow or malicious compliance or what but, like, this is as close to posting your code without posting your code that I can imagine. Or am I missing something?
The moral drift seems to be a bit quicker these days.
What personal scriptural deviations disqualify someone from a pastoral role in the liberal branches of mainline Protestantism these days? Obviously fornication is non-disqualifying, nor is homosexuality, nor is atheism (at least in the United Church of Canada). The Wesleyan Quadrilateral has added a few more sides since my confirmation days, what with respectability and politics becoming the larger sides of the polygon.
Here's a thought: is it possible that objective measures of "morality" (in particular, crime rates) can go down even though people are no more or less moral than before, because we have managed to outsource lots of moral duties and quandaries to the state, or solve them technologically? In previous centuries, it was a moral duty for men to carry arms to protect their families and their honor. This has become moot, even anachronistic, in places where you can call the police and expect it to protect you. In previous centuries, it was considered the duty of fathers and brothers to watch over the chastity of their female relatives, because an unwanted pregnancy would have been disastrous. With contraceptives, abortion and paternity tests, as well as economic independence for women, this has become a lot less urgent. Generally, we have managed to arrange our lives such that we need to make fewer hard decisions, placing less strain on our moral muscles.
If my grandmother had sold nude photos of herself as a young girl she'd be disowned by society. In 2023 few would care. Sexual morality has reached all time lows in the West.
Is perception not reality despite all the noise that emanates from the media that seems to exploit fear with the frequent telling of this or that bad event? The tolerance of theft that in past was prosecuted clearly would suggest to a great many that morality is less today than in the past; and in some cities like NY, fear of traveling on NYC subways.
I know other people have said this before, but Livy is *right.* The Roman Republic had previously been one of the most functional-at-not-having-civil-wars states in the Mediterranean, thanks in part to Traditional Roman Morality - not the murdering women part, the ridiculous and implausible devotion to the laws part that was regularly celebrated as the chief element of the Roman state's success. That collapsed in the generation of Livy's parents with the Marius and Sulla wars and reached a nadir in his own generation with the massive, bloody civil war that preceded the transformation of Republic to Empire and the de facto return of the Kings of Rome.
Oh boy. Well, you did cover most of my own issues with it.
(Still, what's up about this talk about "other countries [than the USA]", that makes many of these assumptions even worse ?? What about India and China which alone (today at least ?) make up half of mankind ? What about the Muslim world and their very different morals ? What about the fall of the URSS ?!?)
Speaking of footnote 5 and the final bit about wealth :
Well, Livy seems to have been roughly correct : in terms of state capacity, demographics and economics, the Roman empire peaked around the first century !
And I'll have to disagree about the increasing "wealth", I'm not sure what is your definition of it, but sounds like it doesn't include the consumed natural resources nor increasing environmental damage, and because a lot of people indeed don't do that is why we are still careening faster and faster in the direction of ruin, despite having been warned about it more than half a century ago !
> In Orthodox Judaism there is a saying: “The previous generation is to the next one as angels are to men; the next generation is to the previous one as donkeys are to men.”
Or consider the renaissance writers, doctors, and scholars who considered their responsibility as preserving and passing on the superior and untouchable achievements of the Greeks and Romans. In several scholarly traditions--I believe including the aforementioned Judaism but also Chinese philosophy as well as ideologies like Marxism and Objectivism that flow from a single person's writings--you see this same phenomenon. And it's extremely common in fiction, covering not just morality, but domains like architecture, science, technology, proficiency with magic if it exists, wealth/economic development, medicine, etc.
Yes, sometimes this is belief is warranted; see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/. But overall it seems like it points to a bias that isn't just about shifting moral standards (also, it seems unlikely to me that moral standards shifted so rapidly in ancient Rome). I don't know if "reverence for the old" is just its own whole black-box bias that evolution gave us, or if it arises from other biases and/or common tropes in human societies.
"I can’t tell you whether morality is increasing or decreasing. But a first stab would be to note that wealth is increasing. We might expect those virtues which wealth makes less necessary, like industry and chastity, to decline - and those virtues which wealth makes more convenient, like compassion and pacifism, to increase."
The Belle Époque/Edwardian Era was a prosperous and relatively stable (in terms of internal politics of the major powers) time in Europe and in Britain. It was fulminant with antisemitism, colonial depredations, and wretched exploitation of industrial labourers as opposed to compassion, and seething popular nationalism as opposed to pacifism, ending of course in the war.
I don’t even understand the purpose of this paper. I get that it essentially functions as a piece of activism above all else, but I don’t even get who this is for. If MG’s goal was to draw more attention to progressive policy issues, this method of doing so seems like a complete waste of time. Usually when conservatives talk about moral decline, they think of things like acceptance of drugs, sex/pornography, and violence. They then point to overdose/addiction rates, depression/mental illness, violent crime rates etc. as evidence that these things are bad. They will often tie this into church but there’s a lot of secular conservatives these days as well.
So if you’re a progressive who never bought into the conservative idea of moral decline, this paper just exists to reinforce that. If you’re an intelligent conservative and read this paper to gain their perspective, you’re just going to see “oh, they didn’t even include violent crime or drug overdoses” and rightfully dismiss it. If you’re an uneducated MAGA die hard who only reads headlines, the odds of you changing your mind because “studies show morality isn’t declining” are literally zero. So this whole project, which seems like took these gentleman a considerable amount of time and effort, was really just a colossal waste of time. I don’t even understand why stuff like this gets published. Don’t these people want to be impactful on the world, and that’s why they became researchers?
The study sounds like bullshit. I have no clue if a real moral decline is in progress, but my intuition is no over the time scales I care about, but I tend to care about pretty long time scales. I don't read the current news at all, but spend quite a bit of time learning about older history, and study pre-history and even cosmology as hobbies. I tend to reflect upon things like the sheer destructiveness and pointlessness of WWI, children working in coal mines, the fact that the French used to publicly burn house cats alive as a form of entertainment. The past sure seems to contain a lot of examples of utterly careless disregard for human life and literally no regard whatsoever for any other form of life. Many cases of flat-out revelry in the suffering of others.
In comparison, it's hard for me to really think it matters that people are more likely in some countries in 2020 to have sex before marriage compared to 1950. Maybe that has more bad consequences than good and we'll find out down the line it was a bad idea, but in the face of the larger general trend whereby humans far more broadly care at all that other humans in the world are suffering and try to do something about it, that we widely care about other humans aside from our own families at all, taste-based morals don't seem like they make much of a dent. They get magnified into wedge issues and end up hotly debated because they're the only point of divergence we've got and the middle children of history feel like they need something to argue about, but they're not really that important.
As for decline in trust and general feeling of safety, I don't doubt that's quite real, but also a natural consequence of humans encountering far more unknown strangers than ever before, in part because population has increased and thus population density has increased, in part because humans are more mobile than ever and living elsewhere than where they grew up, and in part because of omnipresent telecommunications making it seem like we're surrounded and threatened by far more people than are physically near us. Other humans aren't any less trustworthy on average, you're just more likely to encounter someone who is untrustworthy when you encounter 15,000 unique people a year compared to if it was only 50. And those people might even actually be more likely to try to exploit or deceive you, not because they're worse people, but because you're both strangers and they're less likely to suffer any consequences than if you were part of a small community where everyone knew each other.
Social media tries to simulate this kind of thing with call outs and cancel culture, but it's overwhelmingly for stupid reasons, not anything that makes a material difference to any modal person's feelings of trust and safety.
HDI = Highest Density Interval = a range of values containing some large fraction of the posterior. Used to characterize the range of values that look plausible after Bayesian analysis.
ROPE = Region Of Practical Equivalence = a distance close enough to some value to be "basically the same". Used to let you do null hypothesis testing in a Bayesian framework.
"HDI within the ROPE" = almost all of the density of the posterior is so close to 0 (or whatever null) that it's basically just 0.
So what posterior are they calculating? What *parameter* has "HDI within the ROPE"? Here's their methods on study 4:
"We fit a linear model for each survey. The year of each survey was always entered as a predictor and the outcome was always the average perception of current morality. We used R^2 values as a measure of effect size. We fit Bayesian models using the Rstanarm package in R[33] and extracted the percentage of the 89% HDI that was contained in the ROPE, which was by default defined as ±0.1 standard deviations. We used the package’s default Markov Chain Monte Carlo and prior settings (M = 0, scale of 2.5)."
That's... not actually very helpful? They don't say what model they're fitting to for the Bayesian analysis, and I don't understand what the ROPE is +/- 0.1 standard deviations OF. I'd look at the code to figure this out, but it's behind a "request data" wall, and I'm waiting on the request with no idea if it will be granted.
Still, I'm a little alarmed at Scott's treatment of statistics in section II. The reason we adopted statistics in science was to prevent people from looking at graphs and saying "this data obviously shows a trend, you can see by the lines" when the data doesn't, in fact, show a trend. Turning around and saying "if the statistics say there's no trend there, then I don't trust statistics" is a red-flag move -- it could be the right move, given a strong enough data trend and a mysterious enough statistical test, but if you find yourself making it then you should halt and consider whether you should catch fire.
...is this data strong enough that we can ignore the statistical test? I wouldn't say so. We see a bunch of mean values at each time with no hint about the range or distribution within each summed-up point. This could easily be a bunch of noise. If I collected a dataset like this (I'm in biology), I wouldn't QUITE throw it out as noise without doing any statistics on it at all... but it'd be close.
I'm also a bit concerned that we're cherry-picking ONE graph to stare at out of THREE different charts at the linked source and TWELVE questions assessing general morality/trustworthiness used in the original paper.
Another theory (unrelated to this data) is just simple moral pluralism. Society is FOR SURE getting more "cosmopolitan".
Things could be getting better and better in aggregate, but also since people's individual sense of morals are getting more and more diverse, there is less and less sense other people are moral (because they don't match your standards and care about other things).
Also on the Livy thing, or really any "hey the Romans thought they were in decline" comment. The Romans often were in decline. There were a lot of ups and downs, and the peak of their geopolitical power didn't necessarily match up very well with their peak of civic mindedness and personal virtue.
This exemplifies a concern I have about the increasing tendency of traditionally scientific journals like Nature to publish hot button social science papers. It's easy to load value judgements and controversial philosophical positions into such papers, even without dubious intent, and present them as empirical, scientific findings. While it's a nice dream, to do truly scientific social science, I suspect this turn will likely do the opposite and let the problems of social science corrupt otherwise scientific journals rather than making academic social science more scientific.
On an institutional level at least, the world has become much more moral during the last decades. The ball started rolling with the 1945 agreement on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, first in the so-called West, but increasingly everywhere. For example, the US cannot any longer sell arms to Nigeria to quell Boko Haram, since the Nigerian government cannot offer the type of guarantees that no violations of Human Rights will take place, that US weapons manufacturers need for their paperwork. (While on a mass level, the woke-phenomenon indicates that we live through a historical period ideologically dominated by a normative signals arms race, i.e. signalling-higher-morality-than-you.)
I'm tempted to link the quadrupling of male dropouts to skyrocketing marijuana consumption but, alas, trying it in college or at a party a couple times hardly qualifies as "use".
Although I'd appreciate the company. I suspect our adult population of tokers is closer to 10%.
I don't think it's true that science advances funeral by funeral, but morality very well might. I don't think it's a coincidence that there wasn't a civil rights movement for American blacks as successful as the one led by Martin Luther King Jr. until after the Confederate veterans of the Civil War were all dead.
This is one of my few worries about radical life extension: it's a lot easier to raise a child not to be a bigot than it is for an adult that is a bigot to stop being one, and you can say the same thing about other changes in people's individual morality. What other attitudes would someone born in 1800 have to change before they wouldn't be considered a moral monster by today's standards?
Moral decline seems like a pretentious phrase for “the kids these days, I tell ya.” It seems mainly that the moral standards of the prior generation becomes simply irrelevant and replaced with different standards.
"There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed."
It seems to me there's something wrongheaded about trying to figure out whether people believe morality has declined. The effort presumes that this question, as formulated, is one that people think seriously about, and have definite views on. I'm not at all sure most people do. There are lots of big general questions like "is morality declining?": what makes for a happy life? is it important for kids to be exposed to the arts? what kind of landscape is most beautiful -- seascape, meadow, mountain view, other? are some animal species happier than others? which sport takes the most skill? is gambling completely pointless? will our species reach the stars someday?
I think most people do not have a view about most of these questions, though of course you can get people rambling on one of these subjects, and if you insist they fill in an answer or a rating of each on a survey people will do it. I for instance, do not have an opinion about whether morality is declining, and if pushed to give a detailed and honest answer I'd start by saying that I don't know what, exactly, I'd consider to be components of morality. A few things people do seem clearly bad to me, a few seem clearly good, and most of the rest seem interesting and complicated to me and when I think them over I am not very likely to be asking myself whether they are ethical or not -- I'm asking myself other questions. It's not uncommon to find someone who has a definite view about *one* of these questions, because it's of personal importance to them. I expect that most astrophysicists have a view about whether our species will reach the stars. But I really doubt that I'm unusual in being someone who does not walk around with an Opinion of Trends in Morality meter in me someplace, or a Skill Level Required by Different Sports table.
> They mention in the text that these kinds of questions did better than others; 50% report improved treatment of gay people. But what are the other 50% thinking??!
I'm not sure how closely you quoted the actual poll questions, but the wording in your post asks whether "things have gotten better", not whether "gays are being treated better", so I could imagine someone who thinks we have TOO MUCH wokeness today might answer "worse".
Most serious expositors of moral decline (or, more broadly, civilization decline) posit trends on the order of centuries, not decades. Moreover, they often hold that, over enough centuries, you see a sinusoidal pattern, with rises alternating with declines.
Thus, there is zero contradiction is holding that we have long been in a secular decline, that Livy, writing in 1st century BC, was too, and that there have been rises in between.
I was with you until section III, where you started bringing "conservative values" into the equation. Yes, it's true that if you focus on the subset of moral values that were considered important by people in the 1940s but aren't considered important by people in 2020s, then it will seem as though morality has declined over the past 80 years. By the same token, you could just as easily argue that by the standards of 2020s progressives, morality (i.e. opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia) has actually increased over time! But these conclusions don't say anything interesting, and they don't really answer the question except in a frustratingly narrow sense. All it really amounts to is an acknowledgement that some of society's dominant values change over time, which is obvious to anyone who's even mildly familiar with history.
To actually make the question worth asking or answering at all, you need to focus on the moral values that *don't* change, the ones that transcend the political divide. Look at the things that people in the 1940s *and* the 2020s would both agree are good, and see if people are doing those things less. Look at the things that both conservatives and liberals would agree are wrong, and see if people are doing those things more. That's precisely what the studies you quoted were trying to do (both 40s conservatives and modern progressives would agree that violent crime is bad), so criticizing them for ignoring partisan and period-based standards of morality is completely missing the point. Not including those standards isn't anti-conservative bias, it's just neutrality. (If they'd really had a progressive bias, they could've just compared the number of Black, female, and openly LGBT Senators in 1940 vs. 2020, and then claimed the dramatic increase as proof that people were actually much more moral than they used to be.)
The opposite study would not be taken very seriously, I imagine. "We find that polls consistently show that people think that the poorest among us are being more and more taken advantage of. We show however through objective metrics that the average inflation adjusted income of the poorest among us from 1949 to today is in fact ... . This is important because a prolonged false belief in economic decline can redirect scarce resources away from the pursuit of spiritual endeavours which - given our position in Mazlow's hierarchy - are those of greatest importance in the present era".
The point about the specific morality of different periods is valid, but also points directly to how "morality" is being changed. This is indirectly alluded to in noting that various standards and behavior concerning racial bias, religion etc have lapsed but it does not automatically follow that modern "moral" practices are superior. They are just different.
It does also appear - very obviously to such as myself or those who similarly do not share PMC "morality" - that said modern standards are defined as being inferior to the past.
A simple generic example would be marijuana use. While I personally don't care about marijuana use one way or the other - the fact is that the laws governing its use have been under assault for decades and the 49% referenced are *all* breaking federal law still.
Yes, people drank alcohol too when it was illegal by Constitutional amendment 100 years ago - but they didn't pretend it was moral.
Is there a reality of social scientists talking themselves stupid? This is a good example in a long litany clearly and obviously silly work being published. I truly see it as some of the most base and clearly biased nonsense which is akin to a toddler whose face is covered in cookie crumbs insisting that it isn’t and they don’t know what happened to the cookies.
The nuclear article opens with a similar set of conceits about the apparently super powerful anti nuclear activists who stopped a giant industry in its tracks. It just sounds so dumb when thinking about all the other ways in which everyday activists have failed to stop powerful industries, even after clear and large scale harms have been inflicted on them and their children. When we engage in intentionally obtuse and extreme thinking in isolation about observing anti nuclear activists, dropping public approval polls, and the failure of the nuclear industry to expand…then it is obvious to them how a story shapes up of ultra powerful activists who the government listened to and enacted laws to do what they wanted before anything bad happened to anyone. As if!
Except you know…how this almost never happens in any other topic. Could it be…nuclear actually is unsafe?! Hard, expensive, impossible to ensure commercially, and involves extreme transportation risks if larger amounts of material were being moved around? Hmmm, this thinking in isolation is truly absurd. I call this taking themselves stupid. This is the same bone headed nonsense sham logic which calls for and demands published studies on topics like animal intelligence or if babies feel pain. When any mother or anyone who works with animals can tell you the answers to these obvious questions. Nope, get lost thousands of years of experience, the real arrogance of the self appointed experts are now on the scene to ‘study’ things.
Yes indeed if you check in with common people, they can be trusted and are correct about their own lives and beliefs. This gating off of knowledge behind ‘expertise’ is absurd. The intellectual crime of credentialism and incredulous attitudes towards anything outside their own contrived orthodoxies is a plague on progress and a waste of resources.
I've tried to edit this twice, and substack has immorally made the comment disappear.
Security has costs. Locking and unlocking a door takes time repeatedly. Losing a key or other similar failures takes more time, and it's unpredictable.
In cold climates, people seem less likely to lock their doors, presumably because they don't want to leave their neighbors outside to freeze.
When I lived in Newark, Delaware (a medium-sized college town), there was a while when, if I mentioned it, people would get angry at me. I'm not sure why, but I think it was because they didn't want to hear me complaining if I got burglarized.
Thinking about the connotations of "moral decline", shoplifting has become an organized crime project rather than just individual decisions. Shoplifting has become a much more serious problem, but I don't think people think of organized crime taking up shoplifting as moral decline. Or do they?
Fewer people get married. They get married later. And it ends in divorce far more often.
In 1950, what % of children under the age of 18 were living with both married biological parents? What is that % in 2020?
This plus probably the #1 thing people notice. There is no fudging it.
Even those social classes that partially reversed (but didn’t completely repair) the divorce rate did so mainly by delaying marriaige and having well below replacement fertility. People in 1950 were having 2.5 kids young and still keeping it together.
If the lack of chastity wasn’t correlated (causing?) the lack of stable marraige people wouldn’t care, but many see them as linked.
> They mention in the text that these kinds of questions did better than others; 50% report improved treatment of gay people. But what are the other 50% thinking??! The answer has to be something like “2002 to 2013 is too short a time to measure even extremely large effects that were centered around exactly this period”.
Well, presumably some of them are thinking "the amount of 'respect and courtesy' that must be extended to gays now is well in excess of what would be appropriate, which is a change for the negative compared to the past". Increased respect and courtesy aren't automatically good things. The question was whether things have gotten better or worse, not more or less courteous.
The last paragraph in their discussion is interesting. They discuss how the illusion of moral decline could lead to what, for lack of a better term, seems to be in their eyes actual moral decline “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.”
Then they end by saying “ Achieving a better understanding of this phenomenon would seem a timely task.”
If their thesis is correct, then there’s nothing “timely” about this task- the illusion of moral decline has been affecting human society for more than 2000 years, including in the periods where we founded democracies, abolished slavery, and fought Hitler. If this illusion had been getting people to focus on imaginary problems and choose bad leaders, then it has been doing so throughout history , well before the 2016 US election.
It's easy to notice what has gotten worse -- e.g., when it comes to spectacular crimes, there are more school shootings and other mass shootings than when I was a kid in the 1960s-1970s. On the other hand, there appear to now be fewer political assassinations, bombings, skyjackings, kidnappings for ransom, and bank robberies. But it's hard to remember what isn't around much anymore.
Growing up in Los Angeles, for example, RFK was assassinated at L.A.'s most famous old hotel the night he won the Democratic California primary when I was nine, the Manson Murders of Sharon Tate and friends were a few miles away when I was ten, and the LAPD burned down the Symbionese Liberation Army's house (but kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst wasn't there) when I was 15.
Was Los Angeles crazier around 1970 than it is today? I'd guess ... probably, but then who really knows? I'm not as entertained by the local news as when I was a kid, so I can't really compare fairly.
Trust and tolerance are inversely proportional. As social tolerance for differences improves trust in society declines. Trust is a function of being able to understand what others around you are thinking, which is hurt by tolerance of differences of upbringing.
Moral decline sounds like it fits: All the mature decent old people keep dying off and being replaced by these immature babies with no self-control. Been happening forever, kinda weird.
There has been moral progress due to advancements in science, technology and knowledge. There is less suffering today than in the past and more flourishing.
Re footnote 4 - That's kind of the point of Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" - liberals don't realize some people have more moral "flavors" than care and fairness. So they can ask people about morality and not think about other things like tradition, sanctity, etc.
It doesn't sound like a very good study, but I don't think the perception of declining morality has much to do with declining morality however it is "measured". There are two ways to interpret all those reports of declining morality for the last several thousand years. Nehemiah anyone? Morality can indeed have been declining since the Garden of Eden or Olduvai Gorge or many, possibly most, people in every age have had a sense of declining morality. That latter should not be a surprise. We are taught in every society to develop a moral sense of what is right and what is wrong. It's part of our training to live in human society, and I can't think of a culture that doesn't frame human behavior in terms of moral judgement. Despite this, no society has ever lived up to its moral precepts. People aren't easily programmable robots, and moral codes are always full of conflicts, contradictions and compromises. Thou shalt not kill, unless you serve in the military in which you might get a medal for killing or executed for failing to do so. That means, as people age and experience life as adults, they are exposed to a world far from that about which they were taught. Most people do follow their childhood moral precepts to some extent. Society would be much worse than it is without that. However, almost all of us wind up compromising on some points. Worse, many people violate those precepts but only some of them are punished while others thrive. If you don't have a sense of declining morality as one ages, you are either extremely well grounded or simply oblivious.
P.S. I was reading a study, "The Age of Anxiety Birth Cohort Change in Anxiety and Neuroticism, 1952-1993", which addresses anxiety in teenagers. "The average American child in the 1980s reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s." More recent reports on the adolescent anxiety suggest that the trend has continued, though, I'll add cynically, with climate change replacing nuclear war as the big bad. I'm sure my parents were all relaxed and mellow when war broke out in Europe and Asia during the Great Depression and great^N grandparents positively euphoric in the face of the Revolutions of 1848 and American Civil. As with adults facing declining morality, could it be that adolescence is a time of anxiety?
>In the 60s, in the city center, they felt comfortable walking alone at night. Now, in the suburbs, still they feel comfortable walking alone at night.
ROPE and HDI are Bayesian statistical terms. ROPE = Range of practical equivalence. HDI = Highest density interval.
The gist of it is that you pick a minimum effect size that you would be willing to consider interesting, the authors of this paper chose +/- 0.1 standard deviations which I believe is the value Kruschke recommended for very conservative analyses (See the Kruschke paper from 2012 titled something to the effect of "Bayesian analysis is better than T-tests, you stupid losers" for more on this).
You then permute different values from posterior distributions of group means and sample standard deviations to produce a sort of ad hoc posterior distribution of effect size.
The HDI is the smallest portion of this effect size distribution whose integral is equal to 0.95. In theory (and if I remember correctly), the percent of the HDI that falls outside of the ROPE is roughly equal to the percent chance of a significant result.
The fact that the authors chose a ROPE of +/- 0.1 is a point in their favor since they're really setting the bar low for a significant result. However, this method still relies on a lot of steps that are susceptible to researcher bias and I'd have to read more of their paper than I have time to in order to get a good grip on how trustworthy their work is.
I will say, when I studied this method several years ago the first thing I said to the person reading the Kruschke paper with me was something like "Wow, somebody could definitely use this to bamboozle a paper reviewer into publishing nonsense one day if they wanted to."
I wonder whether the perceived “lack of morality” that people feel is associated with the decline of religion (as Nietzsche famously said, God is Dead). Without that external rule of religion, people may still be moral enough not to mug others/do bad things that the poll questions asked, but their actions may not fully align with *another* individual. And so to this other individual, the world is less moral. (Note this other individual doesn’t need to be religious either).
I completely agree that this study tells you more about the researchers’ bias rather than the participants’ bias. There is definitely shoehorning of findings, based on shaky assumptions of what these polls are actually reporting.
Lee Kuan Yew (I think? - cant find it now) told a story about visiting London after the war and finding a newspaper stand in a train station with no one attending it. The way it worked was you took a paper from the pile and put your money in the pot, and if there was theft of the money sometimes it was low enough that this worked out as a way to run a business.
The idea of trying that today is ludicrous. Since I first heard it I’ve always thought of this story as an kind of existence proof for the idea that _something_ has changed.
I am reminded of this from Mark Twain: "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."
Our values & ideas always go from indistinct and adaptable when we are young to concrete and rigid as we grow. Does not matter whether it is moral values or technological concepts or intelligence etc., I find we flip from being accepting of other views when we are young to judging other views against our own as we grow older.
There were times I used to wonder "Is it me or the world around me which is changing?" But then I realised, it is both, "I" and "the world" around me mutates, it is just that I mutated with the world when I was young and hence did not see the difference, but as I grew old I fell out of sync with the mutation which caused me to see the change & judge it.
So, irrespective of what the actual is, we always think that things in our childhood were much better and has degraded over time.
Nice post. By the way, violent crime reported is more than double since 1960, but actual murders are up only 20%. That difference may be revealing.
Measures of "violent crime" can pick up changes in whether people feel it's worthwhile to report crime to police, in which case more reports can sometimes match to *less* actual crime.
For this reason, historians prefer to track homicides over time, as murder is almost always reported.
When I see murders up 1.2x, and a 2.5x increase of "violent crimes," one immediate hypothesis is "actually, there aren't 2.5x more violent crimes, people these days just report more of the crime that happens to police."
An exact opposite hypothesis would be "the increase in violent crime is real, and there would be a lot more murders, too, except that modern medicine keeps the assault victims alive and it's not murder if you don't die."
A third sideways hypothesis would be "there aren't even more attempted murders, just more handguns to attack with instead of knives, so the same level of violence as in 1960 is getting 20% more people actually killed."
Which is right? I don't know. But I do know the chart can't tell you!
So "beware the man of one chart" just like you would "beware the man of one study."
Yikes the discussion section in the nature paper is chilling. What I do see is editorial decline in our science journals.
I'm too eager to get this comment out to really check thoroughly, first... (edit: well that bit me — dunno how many damn words were autocorrected to the wrong goddamn form, initially...)
...but it looks to me like you're right about the statistical methods used. That's not how I'd do it, I think.
The "Bayesian" method they use is interesting, but as the documentation on it (that is, on the "Bayesian RoPE" method using the Highest [Probability] Density Interval™) takes ESPECIAL CARE! to caution the would-be user that defining the ROPE ("region of practical equivalence" — the range wherein the parameter-of-interest's values are "negligible" / "of negligible magnitude") offers an unfortunate latitude to the researcher.
That is: both the range itself *and* the choice of units are left to the user's judgment, with no clear Best And Objective Way to use as a bright-line distinction — and the choice of units can determine whether the *same exact data* is counted as confirming the null or no.
Man, this is just *made* for Garden-of-Forking-Paths–ing (GoFPing?) until you've got a satisfying conclusion!
That's in theory, anyway. In this particular case, maybe they actually did pick common-sensical values for the "negligible effect" range (RoPE)
I want to agree, but I really don’t think amoral rationality has moved the needle enough to justify my bias.
>(think I’m strawmanning? Read the last paragraph of the Discussion section)
My god, you're not kidding. Quoting it for anyone else:
>>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.
...Also, I'm surprised you didn't link this back to "Social Psychology is a Flamethrower"; this is clearly some choice napalm.
If you think of morality as a magnitude (which I think is the right way of thinking about it) then any move away from what you think of is right is a decline. You can't super not-cheat-on-your-wife. So its a bit of a silly question. If morality hasn't declined then it hasn't changed. But it clearly has changed.
To biological creatures, evolutionary pressures are God. Therefore, since evolutionary pressures are inconsistent across place and time, God is always a creature of the moment, enforcing his will most brutally on yesterday's favorite children. The fundamental act of morality is patricide, our parents, demons.
Insofar as the direction of travel for morality is driven by young people, an aging society would feel increasingly alienated from the moral trajectory simply on account of ratios of young to old.
Expanding on what you briefly mentioned about wealth, I think you could divide morality into roughly two categories:
A) "be a good Roman" morality- meaning acting based on feelings of duty/ honor to do hard/ badass/ valuable things that benefit others/ make you look cool. This is more Nietszchean.
B) "don't be a nazi" morality- meaning being careful to not accidentally act on evil morals and serve some super villain dutifully in a way you think is righteous but actually is totally not. This is more like Socrates or something.
Morals in society during times of peace/ prosperity will generally be drifting in the "don't be a Nazi" direction for morality. Judge not that ye be not judged, stop to think before marching off to war, etc. I'd argue we're a lot better at "don't be a Nazi" morality in 2023 than we were in 1949, in spite of all the complaints about liberals being speech Nazis/ alt right people being literal Nazis. People in general are probably much more open minded, accepting, not racist, not sexist, empathic, and humble with regards to morality than they were then.
But "don't be a Nazi" morality is negatively correlated with "be a good Roman" morality. So since 1949 we've also gotten significantly less good at what you call "1940s morality." And while 1940s morality and Livy's model for morality are much different, they both have in common that they are calling people to behave according to specific norms, calling on people to live up to a specific model for good citizenship that involves a lot more than just "being chill." During times of war or economic hardship, "be a good Roman" morality probably improves, while "don't be a Nazi" morality probably erodes.
So this seemingly constant attitude that morality is in decline could on some level simply reflect this conflict between two opposing things that we happen to call "morality." Most of the time, civilizations slowly get more prosperous, leading to things shifting in a "don't be a Nazi" direction. But we focus on the negative and see how everyone is being less good Romans- being more directionless, apathetic, etc. Then a war breaks out and patriotic fervor explodes out of nowhere, labor force participation rates soar, the martial virtues that Livy loves so much increase. But as this happens, we can't help but notice that humans are murdering eachother like animals, and all kinds of other atrocities are occurring. Clearly morality must be in decline, it's the end of the world. So perhaps the only time societies in general feel like morality is improving is right after a victorious war, when the soldiers come home and stop killing people, taking their disciplined habits and conformist haircuts with them. At these moments both type A morality and type B morality can seemingly both be at new heights at the same time. But most of the time it will seem like the world is getting either more Nazi or more apathetic.
I suspect quite a few of the differences reflect changes in the distribution, most people have got far less violent, you are far less likely to be attacked by your spouse, parent, boss, cops, teacher, customers in your local pub but 15-30 year old males linked to the drugs trade have got much violent and that explain all of the increase in violence.
I am not sure I follow all of the arguments in this post. Just to pick on one aspect: Do we really suspect that people have the same inclination to report violent crimes (in particular rape) today as compared to 50 years ago? Research seems to document that more rapes are being reported in recent years, compared to 50 years ago. Hence, any uncritical referral to general violent crime rates is just going to be...biased.
Given that people complaining about moral decline seems to happen in most time periods, should we think that moral progress/regress and moral drift have been constant or moving in tandem for that entire time? Or perhaps my presumption that complaints of moral decline are universal is wrong?
This reminded me of Schwitzgebel's work (http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/BehEth-140123a.htm) aiming to show that ethicists were not more moral than others. But then you look at their measures and they are things like: "Ethics books were more likely to be missing than other philosophy books: 8.5% of ethics books that were off the shelf were missing or more than one year overdue, vs. 5.7% of non-ethics books, a risk ratio of about 1.5 to 1 (66/778 vs. 52/910, CI for difference +0.3% to +5.2% , Z = 2.2, p = .03)."
Trying to present quotes from Roman Empire-perdiod historians as evidence that moral decline is all alarmism and illusions is particularly ironic, when Rome is a canonical example that a civilization can spoil, decay, and collapse. One can almost conclude that we're dealing with New Dark Age cheerleaders.
From where I sit, "morality" consists of a set of rules that Good People (TM) impose on everyone else. Women should be subordinate to men. Blacks should be subordinate to whites. Particular types of clothing should be worn, indicating one's status in the social hierarchy. Sexual activity must be done in the correct way, with the correct person. Everyone should participate in religious rituals. Etc. etc. somewhat ad nauseam.
I don't think my use of this term is especially unusual in my generation - just about everyone who felt they were should-on by the Religious Reich tended to adopt this usage. We remember the Moral Majority (TM), and what it claimed was "moral".
Perhaps some of my peers have mellowed with age. But if I'd been responding to any such survey, the results would be somewhat "through the looking glass'.
This is also my context for these researchers' ideas of "objective morality". They've picked a set of rules - perhaps less pernicious than those purveyed by the Religious Reich (you do say they appear to be left wing) - and tried to create a metric based on those rules. Unfortunately, there isn't any uncontested set of rules that all will accept, even in a single generation - as you point out for the specifics of their "objective" metric.
Perhaps any attempt to measure people's perceptions of moral trends tends to measure conformity - to what extent does everyone in the society agree on the same shoulds and oughts?
Consider two types of violators of moral rules:
- the sinner violates rules that they agree with, or at least give lip service to. They conceal their sin if possible, and repent when caught.
- the outsider violates rules that they don't agree with. They are more likely to argue that your rules are insane than to conceal their activities.
I have no non-anecdotal evidence, but I strongly suspect that outsider behaviour counts *much* more than sinner behaviour in people's perceptions of what they see as immorality. And this is particularly true when the outsiders are right there in your face, claiming equal or higher status, rather than in some benighted foreign territory.
And that's what we have in the US - two or more separate solitudes that can't help but see each others' conflicting rules and behaviour.
When more than 50% of the country doesn't think my rules should be imposed, *whichever set I believe in*, it sure looks like moral decline, at least if I believe there was a recent time (the 1950s?) when there was something a bit more like majority agreement.
I'm inclined to think of this in terms of personal virtue, and it strikes me that there is a component to one's moral character that is independent of their moral beliefs. Let's go back to Rome again and pick some noteworthy historical figures as examples, say Cato the Younger and Sulla, and think about their moral character. The reception of Sulla ranged from a monster among his political enemies to being treated with great embarrassment even among his fellow Optimates. In contrast, while Cato has received criticism for being too uncompromising in all ages, few would dispute his moral integrity, both then and now. And that's despite the fact that he was championing the sort of values that would e.g. have husbands kill their wives if caught drinking.
I would suggest that there's two components to one's morality: the ethical theory that concerns oughts and ought-nots (and is in itself composed of purely arbitrary or at best contextual mores like what is an appropriate way to dress, and a body of more rigorously constructed morality that is not /objective/ per se, but given assumptions from evolved human psychology, such as that pleasure is better than pain, can be demonstrated by an argument, and that I would argue has grown at least a bit during the course of human history), and then one's virtue, such that a virtuous character is more capable of being their best self in embodying their ethical beliefs. For example, in one time and context a just character might kill their wife for drunkedness, while in another time a just character might fight against police brutality, but the justness of their character is timeless: we are still inclined to think Cato is a paragon of cardinal virtues even though his ethical beliefs have something reprehensible to anyone alive today, and I would like to think that the Romans too could see the virtue in our contemporary moral examplars, even if they would think their cause is beyond misguided.
And this raises a question that I think is in principle answerable although I don't know how: are contemporary people more or less virtuous than people were 10/100/1000/2000 years ago?
Not only is this article below the supposed high standards of Nature but if I recall correctly this messy study is based on Mastroianni's PhD. Social "sciences" are doomed.
Great post! I skipped on the "study" (delete unread), as I was sure not to learn anything new. I never skip Scott as I always learn/think sth. new. My morals should be 1970, and they are in some ways, but maybe not the whole package (church on Sunday was a thing in my family and most others/ divorce, kids-out-of-wedlock did happen rarely/ gay?/ LBTIAR+? kidding).
I do believe our "morals" in post-war Germany improved clearly: people born in my country are usu. acting much more domesticated today than they did in 1986, and from what I read, 1962 was barbaric (google: Straßenschlachten in München 1962 - street-battles weekend after weekend for no apparent reason) . The past is a foreign country. - We do have more people arriving with other Schelling-points nowadays, true. But I see some of their points moving fast.
Quick and dirty answer: yes and no.
Yes, an "illusion" because modern we have rejigged morality to mean "all the old stuff our forebears said was sin and dumb cruft like that, we now say is perfectly cromulent and normal". The same way that owning slaves was not immoral in a society where slavery is commonplace and accepted, but only becomes immoral when later generations decide "no, you neither should nor can own slaves". Morality is subjective, a standard we draw up new measures for in every generation. There never was a Golden Age of the past where everyone was perfectly moral; it is up to us to define and create new Golden Ages.
No, not an "illusion" because hell yeah there's a moral decline from the standards of the past. Owning slaves is always wrong because humans are not property, and it doesn't matter if it's a thousand years ago in the Classical world or today in Africa. We've redefined morality to mean "the things we disapprove of" and that can be racism or sexism or transphobia, but the things we like and want to do are now okay - no they're not, not if you cleave to a standard of absolute/objective morality. We flatter ourselves that we are becoming kinder, nicer, more moral by comparing present day to the worst parts of the past (slavery, colonisation) but we omit comparisons with social and civic values we find inconvenient or which would leave us in a worse light.
I'm not sure about these, but I also see other possible explanations.
Could a perceived decline in morality also be related to more and more of our lives being governed by large institutions which, while consisting of moral people, are driven by other incentives, e.g. profit maximizing companies?
Another reason for perceived morality decline could stem from less direct interactions with other people and more of our view of morality being affected by news and social media where immoral actions might be more widely publicized.
So while the average person might be regarded as equally moral as before, society could still be perceived as less moral.
<i>And this is part of why I find the introductory quote by Livy so annoying. What was morality to Livy? Respecting the lares and penates. Performing the ancestral rites. Chastity until marriage, then bearing strong children (Emperor Augustus’ famous law demanded at least three). Martial valor and willingness to die pro patria. Commoners treating patricians with the respect due a noble class, and patricians treating commoners with noblesse oblige.</i>
Since the paper uses violence as a proxy for moral decline, it might be interesting to see how violent Livy's own age was. Of course, we don't have crime statistics for the ancient world, so we can't really say whether personal murders or assaults were more or less common, but political violence was certainly prevalent. Livy was born in 59 BC, and published his first books probably around 27-25 BC. Between the time of his birth and becoming a published author, therefore, Livy would have seen no fewer than *six* civil wars (Caesar's Civil War of 49-45 BC, the War of Mutina 44-43 BC, the Liberators' Civil War 44-42 BC, the Sicilian War of 42-36 BC, the Perusine War 41-40 BC, and the civil war between Octavian and Anthony 32-30 BC). His father's generation (say, the forty years before Livy's birth) would have seen another five or so (depending on whether you consider the Sertorian War as separate from Sulla's second civil war, and whether you count the Third Servile War or not). That's... really quite a large number of civil wars, especially when you consider that Rome had once been unusually politically stable compared to other Mediterranean city-states.
And it's not as if the Roman elite were all upright and virtuous between their bouts of civil warring, either. There are plenty of anecdotes from this era about the corruption and rapacity of Roman governors. Again, we don't have precise statistics, but opportunities for corruption had certainly increased (more distant, wealthy provinces --> more opportunities to extort stuff from the locals with minimal oversight from the government back in Rome), so it's at least probable that the anecdotal evidence does capture a real trend here. And of course, this rapacity didn't remain confined to the provinces, either: Sulla proscribed many citizens simply to get at their wealth, and the Second Triumvirate were notorious for seizing people's land to redistribute to their own soldiers.
On a more personal level, I remember my classical lit professor at university used to argue that there probably was more extra-marital sex in the late Republic than in previous eras. Basically, the big wars of the period (both civil and foreign) took elite men away to the provinces for sometimes years at a time, while their wives and daughters were usually left back in Rome. So you had a large group of upper-class women with both the motive to commit adultery (since the only alternative was going without any sex at all for years on end) and the means to do so (your husband can't easily keep an eye on your behaviour when he's off fighting in Gaul or Syria).
So we have a state trapped in a cycle of political violence, with corrupt and extortionate rulers, and high levels of adultery among the upper classes. That sounds like a situation where someone might reasonably say "Yep, moral standards aren't as high as they used to be."
Also... These sorts of "Here's someone in the past complaining about falling moral standards" anecdotes usually expect the reaser to fill in "...but everything worked out fine anyway, so clearly it was all just a big fuss over nothing." But let's consider what actually happened in the late Republic. On the one hand, the Roman state survived, so I guess things worked out fine in that sense. On the other hand, you had a good century or so of escalating political violence, culminating in the abandonment of Rome's traditional constitution and the imposition of a military dictatorship because that was the only way people could see of stopping the continual civil wars. I think it would be quite reasonable for someone to consider this a pretty bad outcome.
Both the MG paper and the post cite Livy. Funny nobody cites Ecclesiastes "Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this".
I tend to agree that MG are coming in with their own set of biases; if morality is not declining, then people today are as moral as people in the past.
But that also means that people in the past were as moral as people today, and we can look at things like "racial injustice" to see that is not so.
So there can only be no moral decline if people today are *more* moral than people of the past. And if it is possible to improve morally in some areas, then it must also be possible to decline morally in some areas, unless we also propose that the present is becoming more moral on *every* measure.
Also, they slip this little nugget in:
"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."
But "racial injustice" *is* a moral issue, and we may take it from the above that MG feel one where we are *not* more moral, that we have stayed at the same level of immorality as the past (or maybe even got worse) for this measure. And there are calls to devote resources to reversing this trend of "racial injustice".
So what is it? An imaginary trend where we don't need to devote scarce resources to reversing it in the case of "racial injustice", or it's only imaginary when it's about issues conservatives care about but for liberals/progressives, it really is a genuine example of moral decline which must be reversed?
I think it's a mistake to assume that the present situation is normal. While morals may drift somewhat from generation to generation, I think the recent moral upheavals are damn near unprecedented, with views of morality on many issues completely reversing within the space of one or two generations, e.g. from the point where you could be jailed for being homosexual to the point where you can be jailed for saying that homosexuality is wrong. This type of thing just doesn't happen all that often.
Our hypothetical person born in the 1940 who complains about the moral decline he's seen is well aware of the metamoral nature of his complaint -- he understands it's not just that the world has got worse according to his moral rules, but that the world has replaced his moral rules with a whole new set of moral rules. Of course the new set of rules is better by the standard of the new rules and worse by the standard of the old rules.
Okay, because I'm not working for the rest of the day (finished the tasks that needed doing) but I'm up and online so I might as well be doing something, let's have a gander at some of the questions.
(1) "“Is there any area near where you live -- that is, within a mile -- where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?”
Depends. There were "bad" parts of town within a mile that have since improved vastly, and the new "bad" parts are a bit more than a mile away. I absolutely wouldn't be walking alone at night on the weekends when the pubs let out, because a bunch of drunk aggressive idiots getting into fights and petty vandalism aren't too discriminating about not picking on innocent passers-by. But quite likely, 'twas ever thus everywhere.
(2) "They mention in the text that these kinds of questions did better than others; 50% report improved treatment of gay people. But what are the other 50% thinking??! The answer has to be something like “2002 to 2013 is too short a time to measure even extremely large effects that were centered around exactly this period”. But then what does that mean for the rest of their data?"
Re: the other 50% who don't think treatment of gay people improved in 2013, I Googled "gay marriage 2013" and found that was the year the Defence of Marriage Act was struck down by the Supreme Court. So if you're pro-gay rights in 2013, you might well feel "We had to go to the frickin' Supreme Court to get our natural rights because the knuckledraggers passed laws to deprive us of them and *still* state bans on gay marriage are not ruled unconstitutional, improved treatment my sparkly kinky Pride ass":
https://www.npr.org/2013/06/26/195956196/supreme-court-extends-gay-marriage-rights-with-two-rulings
(3) "Generally speaking, would you say most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?"
Oh, gosh. My native tendencies make Eeyore look like Pollyanna, so I'm heavily in the "Trust but Verify" camp. This has as much to do with "are you an optimist or a pessimist?" as it does with perceptions of moral decline. And when incentives to be backstabbers in order to get ahead are more plentiful and more encouraged ("only losers take the bus") and there is more social atomisation, more fragmentation, less cohesion, the perception of work and the loyalty owed between employer and employee has changed, 'greed is good' and so forth, when you are interacting with more strangers and there are a lot more scammers out there, then yeah, I think it likely that people will perceive "you can't be too careful".
There is probably an element of illusion in the perception of moral decline in that people get more concerned about these things as they get older and have children and eventually become more dependent. Just as there are always older people complaining about how young people don’t know how to speak properly.
But that doesn’t mean there can’t actually be moral decline.
My guess (not having looked in detail) is that the measurement graph is not considered much evidence in favour of anything because, frankly, it's a noisy mess. Sure, the average of those points is dropping, but those points are so all over the place that any change would need to be either super drastic or super sudden to be significant for this sort of analysis... I guess
Really good take on the recent lack of moral decline paper. It would be great to see a detailed response. When reading the original by @Adam Mastroianni a quote from the British historian Dominic Sandbrook came to mind: ‘there are moments in history when disputes about history, identity, symbols, images and so on loom very large. Think about so much of 17th-century politics, for example, when people would die over the wording of a prayer book.’ Those people would think we were immoral beyond belief … https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/13/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-the-culture-wars-but-were-afraid-to-ask
Hypothesis: People think the world is getting worse because, if they grew up in an environment which was reasonably trustworthy *to* *them*, they will think morality is in pretty good shape. Later, they will experience various defections, and think that things are getting worse.
Also (and thanks for underlining changes in morality) people when they're young may be more willing to believe that standards of public morality are being upheld and acquire a more accurate, cynical view with time.
Possibility for recent decades: computers have made defection much easier. I remember when you could pick up a phone, and you would almost certainly be hearing from a person who wanted to talk with you personally, not an advertisement or a fraud or an automated system doing who knows what who just hangs up. People may have been just as willing to do phone scams in the sixties, but the opportunity wasn't there. A steady drizzle of small defections sounds like it isn't being caught by those studies.
I came up with "nostalgia is fond memories of when your knees didn't hurt". Is it possible people think the world is getting worse because their health is getting worse?
What if, hypothetically, you viewed acceptance of sodomy, illegitimacy, and miscegenation etc as... immoral rather than moral? It’s not my view, but it was of many people in the past... For two of them at least, it almost certainly was for the majority throughout human history. What would our ancestors think of us? And how would you convince them they’re wrong?
Scott’s answer makes sense. There is no “true” morality; it’s something we evolved to allow is to cooperate, be part of a society etc, but the particulars are filled in by the culture of our time and place. Accepting it shows you’re a team player. (Not the most precise explanation, but you get my drift hopefully.)
>But when people say “there was more morality back in the good old days”, they rarely mean “in 2000 compared to 2015”. Even if moral decline were constant and linear, 2000 - 2015 might be too short a period for ordinary people to notice the difference.
I've seen multiple commenters who say that gay rights are fine, but that trans rights are a bridge too far and an example of moral degeneracy. If we take them at face value, then they really are yearning for a return to the good old days of the 2000s.
I guess this idea that everyone adopts the zeitgest of their formative years and sees all changes to that as moral decline is actually a pretty good explanation. Empirically I believe it to be true. But there's a follow-up question - *why* do we do this? Why are we so morally inflexible? Why, when I grow old, will I be unable to accept whatever the cool kids believe?
One other thing I think you can do to help make sense of things is swap "social cohesion" for morality.
I think that the way social cohesion tends to work across much of history is there are brief periods where cohesion increases dramatically, followed by long periods of slow decline. The slow decline of social cohesion is often an *increase* in living standards, because folks are making fewer sacrifices and focusing more on their own well-being.
If this toy model reflects reality, it also mechanically explains the way that observers throughout history keep noting apparent moral decline. Every generation except a few rare exceptions live and die within those long periods of slow social decay.
https://youtu.be/nUBtKNzoKZ4
"There is less homicide today then in 1900" (do you mean 1960?) (note 2). In any case, when comparing homicide rates across time, you must control for the fact that medical care has greatly improved across time. A patient with a stab or gunshot wound that would be lethal in earlier times, is now much more often saved on the operation table. Hence fewer homicides, and more (only) violent assault.
This study fits well in the category of "human history started in 1965 and everything before that was basically cavemen and cartoonishly villainous robber barons twirling their moustaches."
When I here or read about a poll I skip delete and move on down the road. I do read I do listen but not to polls.
Cjeers
The natural comparison would be to look at periods where people claimed moral decline vs moral strength, especially but not exclusively contemporaneously. These periods do in fact exist and the idea that everyone at all times has thought we are in moral decline is something of a myth. If your contemporary morality theory is right you should expect younger people to generally to think we are in a morally strong period. But I don't feel (I know, I know) that's the case today, for example. That the average 20 year old feels America's an especially moral society.
You have several examples even within the last century: The genteel morality of the Edwardian period vs the 1914-1929 excesses. The hardscrabble self-sacrifice of the 1930s to 1950s vs the free love, radicalism, and drugs of the 1960 to the 1970s. And so on. I'd start there to tease out the differences. (Also note, contrary to some political claims, those are not all especially conservative periods.)
I wonder if the last paragraph is meant to specifically address Mastroianni's paragraph on substack about his paper https://www.experimental-history.com/i/126157345/first-a-note-to-the-pedants
This may have to do with the definition of ‘morality’ more than anything else. At least some respondents will include sexual promiscuity and open homosexuality among the immoral behaviors that are increasing, together perhaps with tattoos and obesity. None of these have anything to do with being mugged or not being able to trust others with money, but they are all frowned upon by traditional religions.
> 50% report improved treatment of gay people. But what are the other 50% thinking??!
With the caveat that this is "epistemic standard: stab in the dark", there are certainly "progressive" spaces nowadays where it's forbidden to mention that treatment of minorities has got better, because that would be like claiming that things are maybe not so bad, which would call into question the whole need to burn society to the ground.
There is, of course, a kernel of truth to this idea - homophobia has not completely gone away, and there's still places and jobs and families where being gay means you're going to have a very bad time. I don't disagree that there's still lots of work to be done. But I also think it's both correct and relevant to mention that being gay went from illegal to legal, or that a gay person working in a democratic-leaning large corporation will have a much better workplace environment than a generation ago, at least as far as their orientation is concerned.
"Compared to the past, have things gotten better, worse or stayed the same [regarding] treating African-Americans with respect and courtesy? (2002 vs. 2013)"
Uhm... what if a questioned person does not actually respect the hispanics, gays and/or the African Americans himself? If their mistreatment is framed as a problem, that can get better or worse, presumably depending on social attitudes, therefore some of the respondents must dislike them. Or it would be an unrepresentative poll and therefore worthless. But if a gay-disliking person notices that gays are treated with (from his perspective) undue respect and courtesy, he would have to answer, that the situation got worse. How are those questions not garbage in, garbage out? [maybe I miss some context?]
It's one thing to define moral progress being equivalent with nicer/kinder treatment. But I do not see, how it can even measure by that definition, given that the respondents would not necessarily share that assumption.
I had been assuming that this general study was accurate and fit with my perception of how people experience negativity bias, however I did think of an alternate explanation apart from a critique of the study itself
At some point I switched from a "things are declining" conservative to a "many things are great and getting better and it will all work out" also conservative. But consider the implications if it was a very common belief that things will work out, especially that they will pretty much naturally work out. A society without at least a strong component of people who believed this might be pretty guaranteed to go ahead and experience moral decline
It might be like a driver on a road trip who notices they are 3/4's of the way to the destination, so clearly the belief that taking your foot off the gas will reduce your momentum has not borne out. In this sense negativity bias and accurate assessments of actual moral decline may both exist as a social and personal form of keeping your foot on the gas
"I think (not at all sure!) that this means “the year of the survey explained only 0.6% of the variance in responses”. That sounds tiny. But looking at the graph, the effect looks big. I would file this under “talking about percent variance explained is a known way to make effects sound small”, although I’m not sure about this and I welcome criticism from someone more statistically-literate."
The slope is striking but what's not shown is the literally thousands of data points to show how poorly that slope fits the data generally (aka low variance explained). You can already tell that birth cohort is a pretty big deal, perhaps age of respondent even. Both of these have something to do with "years" but are not the year of response variable. Another source is plain old-fashioned between-participant variability - people within a cohort are more similar to each other than people between cohorts, but even within a cohort, some people are trusting and others aren't. Year of survey response isn't the key factor in explaining variance in trust, other things are.
Hot take without having read the study or even this article yet: people love to quote writers from antiquity writing about moral decline as though that proves that moral decline isn't real. But of course: all of the societies from classical antiquity *really did collapse* centuries ago! And from what little I know about the fall of Rome, it really did have something to do with Rome's inability to produce younger generations with the tenacity and vigor of the earlier ones.
Civilizations have been worrying about moral decline forever, and civilizations have also been collapsing catastrophically forever. It is not obvious to be that these are unrelated.
I'm pleased that Scott's third point matches my comment on their substack at the time, though I used killing one's son as the example rather than one's wife.
Is there any historical period, now commonly thought of as a "golden age", in which the people living through it actually recognized it as such?
"The r^2 statistic of the graph above is listed as '-0.006'." No, the r^2 statistic (which is typically a positive number) is given as 0.008 (on page 56 of the Supplement), and the square root of 0.002 is about 9%. This does not affect your point.
There is a statistic that I find very interesting, not for predicting any decrease of morality (I agree with Scott, morality is clearly not something constant neither in time, places, or social niche. So speaking of change of morality is almost meaningless without much more context) but for predicting social unrest or stability: trust in government. 75->20% is big enough to mean trouble ahead. Especially together with overall trust level (between individuals) going down. My personal impression is that social contract is getting very thin in the western world, and those statistics confirm this impression...
Im afraid my default assumption about social-science research these days is that it is not about discovering truth, it is about establishing truth. Critical Theory Uber Alles.
I think it's useful to imagine the results of a poll that asked, "Do you think your own morality is declining/increasing/staying the same?" I feel like I'm becoming a better person over time, and I suspect that most people would say the same (about themselves, not about me). Yet I would have an extremely hard time coming up with even imaginary statistics to support that perception.
If there are not perceptual biases associated with "morality over time" questions, then people would generally have to be becoming more moral individually while at the same time becoming less moral collectively. That's not impossible; one way to pull that off would be if babies of this generation emerge from the birth canal less moral than babies of previous generations. Seems doubtful.
Another way would be a change in the rate of improvement of personal morality over time: people now improve their morality less rapidly on average now than in the good old days. But that would show up in the responses to the self-improvement question. Also doubtful.
What if people are evaluating the change in morality over time by taking a heuristic shortcut and comparing the morality of old people vs young people? If so, improving personal morality requires old people to be more moral than young people, and the perceptions become consistent.
Here's what I think is actually going on (well, this plus a lot of other stuff): people evaluate society's morality in general by comparing it to their own moral code, which they perceive as superior. The young attribute this difference to societal decay, since what they learn about the past is biased toward noble people doing noble things. The old regard their moral code as the standard, and young people abandoning it represents moral decay in general. The latter is Scott's "moral drift", which is exacerbated by increasing exposure to outgroups.
' “do you think morality is declining?” and people always answer yes.'
Because it always is until it resets, then starts over:
Civilization Cycles Compared
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1btPKl8ynTBr32c17VfKt2mcgD_I97nUg/view
Outside the debate over what real moral decline has occurred or what that means, I do think that their theory on how people construct their mental model of moral decline based on memory and attention is the interesting part. One thing that struck me from the paper is that it seems you can get a rough “perceived decline per year” that is fairly linear and observable among people at any adult age from questions like “is such and such moral thing better or worse now compared to X years ago”. I don’t think there’s much of any metric that would tell you actual morality has declined in a linear fashion. Crime rates went way up and then back down in your graph and I’d be surprised if any other objectively measurable thing we want to use as a proxy for morality does show a strictly linear change. And it doesn’t seem plausible that morality shift from when someone was born to the present has any sort of constant rate of change either; I would be skeptical of someone who said the shifts in morality from 1960-1970 were the same in magnitude as the shifts from 1990-2000 for example. Your thermostat point is well taken, but the only thing we need to doubt is that people’s apparent linear perception of decline corresponds to reality. And there I do think something like the author’s model of memory and attention is valuable. It proves much less than they want, and maybe “people’s intuitive evaluations of the past relative to the present are based on error-prone psychological processes, which psychologists have said for years, and here’s another area where that seems true” is not exactly headline-worthy, but it does seem valuable.
Since this touches upon my area of expertise, a detail on Livy: The paper that Scott quotes, while very learned, perhaps goes to far on the issue of husbands having the right to kill women who drank. Augustus, Livy's contemporary, actually removed the right of husbands to kill their unfaithful wives altogether. Ancient patriarchal customs like the ius osculi – allowing the male relatives of a married woman to check her breath to see if she had violated a ban against drinking alcohol, which doesn't mean it give them the right to kill her – almost certainly were obsolete early in the republican period. Indeed, they were mocked mere decades after Livy and Augustus, for example by Agrippina the Younger when she asked her then-husband, emperor Claudius, to kiss her as a drinking test.
I don't recall a single example of a woman killed for drinking in Roman history, and tons of recorded examples of drunk women.
I wonder if there's something like, "virtues" in the virtue ethics sense tend to decline, because which ones are relevant shift and the older generation are used to thinking of the virtues they follow as inherent morals. And new morals occur but don't feel like virtues at first.
Or the balance shifts towards consequentialism.
Or the pendulum swings back and forth and sometimes we have new moral movements (let's be vegetarian, let's abolish slavery, let's fund international charities), and sometimes we get "we used to do this and now no-one bothers"
Proof by exhaustion is a very good way to put it. Follows the common psych survey paper trick of throwing a ton of cheap, small MTurk samples at the problem. Can't conclude anything meaningful from any of those studies. Possibly the 700 person one from Prolific is ok; not familiar with them. They make no effort to correct or de-bias anything, because you can't when you're running MTurk studies with 100-300 people each.
Explicitly asking people what they think morality was like over the course of 20 year increments before and after they were born is ludicrous. I have no clue how I would answer those questions, and I doubt anyone else really does either. It's a noisy, unnecessarily complex way to get at the general concept of 'subjectively, do you think things used to be morally better or worse than they are now'. And injecting necessary noise is fundamental to their results.
Worse, they then compound that problem by making a derived indicator based on that noisy, overly-complex set of questions and age ((moral decline in 2020 - moral decline at year of birth) / age), on a sample of 347 from a low-quality source (study 2c). *Then* they run a regression on that indicator. The relevant result is that age doesn't impact perception of moral decline. Aka they don't find a significant result. Because the test is comically under-powered and because the explanatory variable they care about is also in the target variable. Proof by obfuscation is another way to put this. They throw around a ton of unnecessary jargon to hide how simplistic what they're doing actually is.
Study 4 (the big one with archival surveys) is a mess, if I'm reading it correctly. Presumably they have all the individual survey responses, so they're regressing the various year indicators on the outcome. But that doesn't really make sense. They care about individual changes, but there aren't repeat responses. What they do is conceptually identical to regressing on the overall survey average, but with a lot of noise injected. And that explains why they can't see an effect in R2 even when you can see one in mean differences: year is a discrete variable with like 8-12 values at most for all of these studies. The variability within years is nearly always going to be far greater than the variability across years.
Even if you have a clear mean difference across years, if the variance within years is sizable and varies across years significantly (which are always true for survey time-series), or if the trend in the average response isn't strong and linear (which it rarely is for surveys), then you won't see an effect in R2. You will see it in the coefficients for the individual years. Which apparently they also didn't test because they just report on one year coefficient, so they probably used year as a generic trend indicator rather than a factor (testing for 'bigger number make survey change' VS what's the effect of year1, 2, etc.).
What would make more sense (especially because it's what they do earlier in the paper) would be testing bias-corrected mean differences of average survey results for every year-pair for every series. But they'd find effects if they did that and it wouldn't tell the story they want.
This is not good work. But it's a topic people like to speculate about and Dan Gilbert is famous, so good enough for Nature I guess. The short version of all this is that they wanted negative findings, so they picked under-powered samples and used noisy, complex metrics. It's like reverse p-hacking.
I suspect that they find that the year only explains 0.3% of the variance because they use additional predictors, such as birth year. So there is a decline across birth years, but within each cohort the difference is basically 0.
I suspect a trend towards "morality is harm reduction" not because of any Haidt principles but simply because we live in an age where we prefer observable performance measures. I mean folks (including me!) will literally argue online about whether a studio produced movie is "objectively bad," when it's clearly a matter of what you value in media. I wonder if morality is the same - it's values-based, but our age is one where unsupported value judgments are passe, so we have to be able to say "see, this value is important because it reduced this specific thing we all agree is a harm."
While I'm mostly this way too, there are tradeoffs in insisting on this standard like there are tradeoffs in everything. For instance, I'm likely to follow any safety instructions/regulations with my daughter, because in any individual case there's a clear harm for ignoring them vs. a much lower cost for following them. But it's entirely possible that in the aggregate this will teach her that safety is an overriding concern and risk-taking is to be avoided. This could create something like moral decline if spread across a generation - it would be extremely difficult to measure in an unbiased way, but still lead to generally worse QoL.
Note also that I'm still defining "moral decline" as "leading to a generally worse QoL." If I made this kind of argument to religious acquaintances they would say "morality is defined by doing what God wants." They might (depending on how infected with modern sensibility they are) argue that doing what God wants leads necessarily to higher QoL but even if it didn't they wouldn't change their mind about what is moral and what is not.
I expect a Pew poll conducted in 850AD would also have seen agreement with the moral decline hypothesis, just as it would with a 'kids today' question. The proper determinant that changes is 'morals' - which certainly change over time. Having said that, like the respondents in 850AD and those in 2023AD, I do think people pay less attention to moral questions, or are more willing to think they shall get away with transgressions. I suppose I would need a news aggregator from 850AD to see how the mass murders and child abuse cases might compare with today's. I suspect such a non-existent device would prove me to be talking out of my arse! Pinker would suggest so.
The violin plots in Fig. 2 of MG are atrocious enough to cast doubt on everything else in the paper.
Scott, I'm going to unscrupulously pirate this post, edit it, and assign it to my junior high classes as supplementary reading next year. I have to teach the "decline bias" in critical thinking. It's always felt weird but I didn't have time to look up anything. You've now articulated everything I had vague misgivings about.
On the other hand, there's Qoheleth. "Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this."
In section III, I can see a potential case for net zero moral change over time. Say humanity is in a blind-men-and-the-elephant scenario. Each generation is partly right about something and really wrong about something else. Each younger generation figures out what the older ones were Damningly Wrong About. And each older generation sees that the younger ones are Damningly Lax About Something Else. But since the older generation always writes the books and editorials, everyone gets the impression things are declining, and no one notices it's net zero.
Anyway, that's the best I can do for MG. Back to editing your post for junior highers...
> 100% of the HDI was within the ROPE
This is the Bayesian version of a significance test.
ROPE = region of practical equivalence, in other words a small area around some parameter value which are considered "close." HDI = highest density interval, in other words the measured value of that parameter, but because it's a distribution, they look at a range of values. In particular, they look at the X% of the distribution which gets the most probability into the smallest range; according to https://easystats.github.io/bayestestR/articles/region_of_practical_equivalence.html, X=89 is standard. What it actually means is "there is a high probability that the measured parameter value is very similar to the hypothesized one" which in this case I'm guessing is 0.
"Is this because their methods are too weak to notice not just the improvement in gay rights over the early 2000s, but the improvement in African-Americans’ condition since the 1950s?"
I know this is snarky, but it is almost crime-think to notice that the treatment of African-Americans has improved. All the disparities that existed in the 1950s still exist, with the percentage disparity not that much different. Since poor treatment of African-Americans by American society is the only socially acceptable explanation, the only logical conclusion is that treatment must still be very bad.
> 1949
the moral decline was set in stone by 1948, thats when orwell published his political predictions
"The r^2 statistic of the graph above is listed as -0.006."
r^2 shouldn't be negative. It looks like the coefficient listed is -0.006 and the r^2 is .008. But this is still strange; the r^2 should be much higher. Even with random data at these sample sizes r^2 should be higher than the values listed for the various surveys in Table S3. Does anyone have an idea what's going on? The numbers are so strange that I almost suspect this may be a data entry error?
Do they not ask a time scale at all?
I think morality rapidly declined when corona hit and several tyrannical impulses kicked in; then some 5% of the population grew a backbone and its in decline again; I think we are better then the romans, but not so sure about the 90s.
100, 10 or 1 years would seem prudent here.
So, um, this is a new one.
So I did what I do with all papers now, I go check to see if the data and code is publicly available, and it is, so bravo on that, but...um, this is just code vomit, for lack of a better term. Like, look at this (https://osf.io/tv5jr), it's ~100 random files created over three years, everything from R code to csv to user/...../source/prop, whatever that is, to powerpoints, and there's an R file which I think just makes one image, "data and code_upload/figure2_code.R", which is just...
Do, do people actually work like this? I mean, I've scanned through this paper, it's not that complicated, I've seen entire data pipelines without this many files. Again, people have different workflows but...but this is really outside anything I've ever seen.
And I'm torn because, on the one hand, I think publicly posting your data and code is one of the most important things academics can do and I want to applaud it here but, also, the entire reason to post your data and code is so other people can double check it and...you can't do this here. I'm not reading all these file and trying to figure out this nightmare workflow of what should be, honestly, like a dozen csvs and a single rmd file.
And I can't tell if this is, like, just a horrible workflow or malicious compliance or what but, like, this is as close to posting your code without posting your code that I can imagine. Or am I missing something?
The moral drift seems to be a bit quicker these days.
What personal scriptural deviations disqualify someone from a pastoral role in the liberal branches of mainline Protestantism these days? Obviously fornication is non-disqualifying, nor is homosexuality, nor is atheism (at least in the United Church of Canada). The Wesleyan Quadrilateral has added a few more sides since my confirmation days, what with respectability and politics becoming the larger sides of the polygon.
Imagine thinking morality is a useful category.
a 0.006% annual change compounded over 50 years is 35%, according to my HP12 calculator.
1.006^50=1.349
or, more to the point, you can make a 35% change over 50 years look trivial by annualizing it to 0.006%.
1.349^(1/50)=1.006
Here's a thought: is it possible that objective measures of "morality" (in particular, crime rates) can go down even though people are no more or less moral than before, because we have managed to outsource lots of moral duties and quandaries to the state, or solve them technologically? In previous centuries, it was a moral duty for men to carry arms to protect their families and their honor. This has become moot, even anachronistic, in places where you can call the police and expect it to protect you. In previous centuries, it was considered the duty of fathers and brothers to watch over the chastity of their female relatives, because an unwanted pregnancy would have been disastrous. With contraceptives, abortion and paternity tests, as well as economic independence for women, this has become a lot less urgent. Generally, we have managed to arrange our lives such that we need to make fewer hard decisions, placing less strain on our moral muscles.
If my grandmother had sold nude photos of herself as a young girl she'd be disowned by society. In 2023 few would care. Sexual morality has reached all time lows in the West.
Is perception not reality despite all the noise that emanates from the media that seems to exploit fear with the frequent telling of this or that bad event? The tolerance of theft that in past was prosecuted clearly would suggest to a great many that morality is less today than in the past; and in some cities like NY, fear of traveling on NYC subways.
I know other people have said this before, but Livy is *right.* The Roman Republic had previously been one of the most functional-at-not-having-civil-wars states in the Mediterranean, thanks in part to Traditional Roman Morality - not the murdering women part, the ridiculous and implausible devotion to the laws part that was regularly celebrated as the chief element of the Roman state's success. That collapsed in the generation of Livy's parents with the Marius and Sulla wars and reached a nadir in his own generation with the massive, bloody civil war that preceded the transformation of Republic to Empire and the de facto return of the Kings of Rome.
Oh boy. Well, you did cover most of my own issues with it.
(Still, what's up about this talk about "other countries [than the USA]", that makes many of these assumptions even worse ?? What about India and China which alone (today at least ?) make up half of mankind ? What about the Muslim world and their very different morals ? What about the fall of the URSS ?!?)
Speaking of footnote 5 and the final bit about wealth :
Well, Livy seems to have been roughly correct : in terms of state capacity, demographics and economics, the Roman empire peaked around the first century !
https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/
(Under the assumption that declining """morals""", whatever he meant by that, would cause ruin.)
Here's another example though from (late) 1rst century (that I just read today!), about a very different (but is it?) dimension :
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-destiny-of-disenchantment/
And I'll have to disagree about the increasing "wealth", I'm not sure what is your definition of it, but sounds like it doesn't include the consumed natural resources nor increasing environmental damage, and because a lot of people indeed don't do that is why we are still careening faster and faster in the direction of ruin, despite having been warned about it more than half a century ago !
Is there a bias that applies not just to morality, but to other aspects of civilization as well? For example, in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger, Eliezer says:
> In Orthodox Judaism there is a saying: “The previous generation is to the next one as angels are to men; the next generation is to the previous one as donkeys are to men.”
Or consider the renaissance writers, doctors, and scholars who considered their responsibility as preserving and passing on the superior and untouchable achievements of the Greeks and Romans. In several scholarly traditions--I believe including the aforementioned Judaism but also Chinese philosophy as well as ideologies like Marxism and Objectivism that flow from a single person's writings--you see this same phenomenon. And it's extremely common in fiction, covering not just morality, but domains like architecture, science, technology, proficiency with magic if it exists, wealth/economic development, medicine, etc.
Yes, sometimes this is belief is warranted; see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/. But overall it seems like it points to a bias that isn't just about shifting moral standards (also, it seems unlikely to me that moral standards shifted so rapidly in ancient Rome). I don't know if "reverence for the old" is just its own whole black-box bias that evolution gave us, or if it arises from other biases and/or common tropes in human societies.
"I can’t tell you whether morality is increasing or decreasing. But a first stab would be to note that wealth is increasing. We might expect those virtues which wealth makes less necessary, like industry and chastity, to decline - and those virtues which wealth makes more convenient, like compassion and pacifism, to increase."
The Belle Époque/Edwardian Era was a prosperous and relatively stable (in terms of internal politics of the major powers) time in Europe and in Britain. It was fulminant with antisemitism, colonial depredations, and wretched exploitation of industrial labourers as opposed to compassion, and seething popular nationalism as opposed to pacifism, ending of course in the war.
Chastity did decline, to be fair.
I don’t even understand the purpose of this paper. I get that it essentially functions as a piece of activism above all else, but I don’t even get who this is for. If MG’s goal was to draw more attention to progressive policy issues, this method of doing so seems like a complete waste of time. Usually when conservatives talk about moral decline, they think of things like acceptance of drugs, sex/pornography, and violence. They then point to overdose/addiction rates, depression/mental illness, violent crime rates etc. as evidence that these things are bad. They will often tie this into church but there’s a lot of secular conservatives these days as well.
So if you’re a progressive who never bought into the conservative idea of moral decline, this paper just exists to reinforce that. If you’re an intelligent conservative and read this paper to gain their perspective, you’re just going to see “oh, they didn’t even include violent crime or drug overdoses” and rightfully dismiss it. If you’re an uneducated MAGA die hard who only reads headlines, the odds of you changing your mind because “studies show morality isn’t declining” are literally zero. So this whole project, which seems like took these gentleman a considerable amount of time and effort, was really just a colossal waste of time. I don’t even understand why stuff like this gets published. Don’t these people want to be impactful on the world, and that’s why they became researchers?
The study sounds like bullshit. I have no clue if a real moral decline is in progress, but my intuition is no over the time scales I care about, but I tend to care about pretty long time scales. I don't read the current news at all, but spend quite a bit of time learning about older history, and study pre-history and even cosmology as hobbies. I tend to reflect upon things like the sheer destructiveness and pointlessness of WWI, children working in coal mines, the fact that the French used to publicly burn house cats alive as a form of entertainment. The past sure seems to contain a lot of examples of utterly careless disregard for human life and literally no regard whatsoever for any other form of life. Many cases of flat-out revelry in the suffering of others.
In comparison, it's hard for me to really think it matters that people are more likely in some countries in 2020 to have sex before marriage compared to 1950. Maybe that has more bad consequences than good and we'll find out down the line it was a bad idea, but in the face of the larger general trend whereby humans far more broadly care at all that other humans in the world are suffering and try to do something about it, that we widely care about other humans aside from our own families at all, taste-based morals don't seem like they make much of a dent. They get magnified into wedge issues and end up hotly debated because they're the only point of divergence we've got and the middle children of history feel like they need something to argue about, but they're not really that important.
As for decline in trust and general feeling of safety, I don't doubt that's quite real, but also a natural consequence of humans encountering far more unknown strangers than ever before, in part because population has increased and thus population density has increased, in part because humans are more mobile than ever and living elsewhere than where they grew up, and in part because of omnipresent telecommunications making it seem like we're surrounded and threatened by far more people than are physically near us. Other humans aren't any less trustworthy on average, you're just more likely to encounter someone who is untrustworthy when you encounter 15,000 unique people a year compared to if it was only 50. And those people might even actually be more likely to try to exploit or deceive you, not because they're worse people, but because you're both strangers and they're less likely to suffer any consequences than if you were part of a small community where everyone knew each other.
Social media tries to simulate this kind of thing with call outs and cancel culture, but it's overwhelmingly for stupid reasons, not anything that makes a material difference to any modal person's feelings of trust and safety.
Did some quick reading on "HDIs within the ROPE".
HDI = Highest Density Interval = a range of values containing some large fraction of the posterior. Used to characterize the range of values that look plausible after Bayesian analysis.
ROPE = Region Of Practical Equivalence = a distance close enough to some value to be "basically the same". Used to let you do null hypothesis testing in a Bayesian framework.
"HDI within the ROPE" = almost all of the density of the posterior is so close to 0 (or whatever null) that it's basically just 0.
So what posterior are they calculating? What *parameter* has "HDI within the ROPE"? Here's their methods on study 4:
"We fit a linear model for each survey. The year of each survey was always entered as a predictor and the outcome was always the average perception of current morality. We used R^2 values as a measure of effect size. We fit Bayesian models using the Rstanarm package in R[33] and extracted the percentage of the 89% HDI that was contained in the ROPE, which was by default defined as ±0.1 standard deviations. We used the package’s default Markov Chain Monte Carlo and prior settings (M = 0, scale of 2.5)."
That's... not actually very helpful? They don't say what model they're fitting to for the Bayesian analysis, and I don't understand what the ROPE is +/- 0.1 standard deviations OF. I'd look at the code to figure this out, but it's behind a "request data" wall, and I'm waiting on the request with no idea if it will be granted.
Still, I'm a little alarmed at Scott's treatment of statistics in section II. The reason we adopted statistics in science was to prevent people from looking at graphs and saying "this data obviously shows a trend, you can see by the lines" when the data doesn't, in fact, show a trend. Turning around and saying "if the statistics say there's no trend there, then I don't trust statistics" is a red-flag move -- it could be the right move, given a strong enough data trend and a mysterious enough statistical test, but if you find yourself making it then you should halt and consider whether you should catch fire.
...is this data strong enough that we can ignore the statistical test? I wouldn't say so. We see a bunch of mean values at each time with no hint about the range or distribution within each summed-up point. This could easily be a bunch of noise. If I collected a dataset like this (I'm in biology), I wouldn't QUITE throw it out as noise without doing any statistics on it at all... but it'd be close.
I'm also a bit concerned that we're cherry-picking ONE graph to stare at out of THREE different charts at the linked source and TWELVE questions assessing general morality/trustworthiness used in the original paper.
Another theory (unrelated to this data) is just simple moral pluralism. Society is FOR SURE getting more "cosmopolitan".
Things could be getting better and better in aggregate, but also since people's individual sense of morals are getting more and more diverse, there is less and less sense other people are moral (because they don't match your standards and care about other things).
Also on the Livy thing, or really any "hey the Romans thought they were in decline" comment. The Romans often were in decline. There were a lot of ups and downs, and the peak of their geopolitical power didn't necessarily match up very well with their peak of civic mindedness and personal virtue.
This exemplifies a concern I have about the increasing tendency of traditionally scientific journals like Nature to publish hot button social science papers. It's easy to load value judgements and controversial philosophical positions into such papers, even without dubious intent, and present them as empirical, scientific findings. While it's a nice dream, to do truly scientific social science, I suspect this turn will likely do the opposite and let the problems of social science corrupt otherwise scientific journals rather than making academic social science more scientific.
On an institutional level at least, the world has become much more moral during the last decades. The ball started rolling with the 1945 agreement on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, first in the so-called West, but increasingly everywhere. For example, the US cannot any longer sell arms to Nigeria to quell Boko Haram, since the Nigerian government cannot offer the type of guarantees that no violations of Human Rights will take place, that US weapons manufacturers need for their paperwork. (While on a mass level, the woke-phenomenon indicates that we live through a historical period ideologically dominated by a normative signals arms race, i.e. signalling-higher-morality-than-you.)
I'm tempted to link the quadrupling of male dropouts to skyrocketing marijuana consumption but, alas, trying it in college or at a party a couple times hardly qualifies as "use".
Although I'd appreciate the company. I suspect our adult population of tokers is closer to 10%.
I don't think it's true that science advances funeral by funeral, but morality very well might. I don't think it's a coincidence that there wasn't a civil rights movement for American blacks as successful as the one led by Martin Luther King Jr. until after the Confederate veterans of the Civil War were all dead.
This is one of my few worries about radical life extension: it's a lot easier to raise a child not to be a bigot than it is for an adult that is a bigot to stop being one, and you can say the same thing about other changes in people's individual morality. What other attitudes would someone born in 1800 have to change before they wouldn't be considered a moral monster by today's standards?
Moral decline seems like a pretentious phrase for “the kids these days, I tell ya.” It seems mainly that the moral standards of the prior generation becomes simply irrelevant and replaced with different standards.
"There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed."
Senator Robert Kennedy (the real one not his son)
It seems to me there's something wrongheaded about trying to figure out whether people believe morality has declined. The effort presumes that this question, as formulated, is one that people think seriously about, and have definite views on. I'm not at all sure most people do. There are lots of big general questions like "is morality declining?": what makes for a happy life? is it important for kids to be exposed to the arts? what kind of landscape is most beautiful -- seascape, meadow, mountain view, other? are some animal species happier than others? which sport takes the most skill? is gambling completely pointless? will our species reach the stars someday?
I think most people do not have a view about most of these questions, though of course you can get people rambling on one of these subjects, and if you insist they fill in an answer or a rating of each on a survey people will do it. I for instance, do not have an opinion about whether morality is declining, and if pushed to give a detailed and honest answer I'd start by saying that I don't know what, exactly, I'd consider to be components of morality. A few things people do seem clearly bad to me, a few seem clearly good, and most of the rest seem interesting and complicated to me and when I think them over I am not very likely to be asking myself whether they are ethical or not -- I'm asking myself other questions. It's not uncommon to find someone who has a definite view about *one* of these questions, because it's of personal importance to them. I expect that most astrophysicists have a view about whether our species will reach the stars. But I really doubt that I'm unusual in being someone who does not walk around with an Opinion of Trends in Morality meter in me someplace, or a Skill Level Required by Different Sports table.
> They mention in the text that these kinds of questions did better than others; 50% report improved treatment of gay people. But what are the other 50% thinking??!
I'm not sure how closely you quoted the actual poll questions, but the wording in your post asks whether "things have gotten better", not whether "gays are being treated better", so I could imagine someone who thinks we have TOO MUCH wokeness today might answer "worse".
Most serious expositors of moral decline (or, more broadly, civilization decline) posit trends on the order of centuries, not decades. Moreover, they often hold that, over enough centuries, you see a sinusoidal pattern, with rises alternating with declines.
Thus, there is zero contradiction is holding that we have long been in a secular decline, that Livy, writing in 1st century BC, was too, and that there have been rises in between.
I was with you until section III, where you started bringing "conservative values" into the equation. Yes, it's true that if you focus on the subset of moral values that were considered important by people in the 1940s but aren't considered important by people in 2020s, then it will seem as though morality has declined over the past 80 years. By the same token, you could just as easily argue that by the standards of 2020s progressives, morality (i.e. opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia) has actually increased over time! But these conclusions don't say anything interesting, and they don't really answer the question except in a frustratingly narrow sense. All it really amounts to is an acknowledgement that some of society's dominant values change over time, which is obvious to anyone who's even mildly familiar with history.
To actually make the question worth asking or answering at all, you need to focus on the moral values that *don't* change, the ones that transcend the political divide. Look at the things that people in the 1940s *and* the 2020s would both agree are good, and see if people are doing those things less. Look at the things that both conservatives and liberals would agree are wrong, and see if people are doing those things more. That's precisely what the studies you quoted were trying to do (both 40s conservatives and modern progressives would agree that violent crime is bad), so criticizing them for ignoring partisan and period-based standards of morality is completely missing the point. Not including those standards isn't anti-conservative bias, it's just neutrality. (If they'd really had a progressive bias, they could've just compared the number of Black, female, and openly LGBT Senators in 1940 vs. 2020, and then claimed the dramatic increase as proof that people were actually much more moral than they used to be.)
The opposite study would not be taken very seriously, I imagine. "We find that polls consistently show that people think that the poorest among us are being more and more taken advantage of. We show however through objective metrics that the average inflation adjusted income of the poorest among us from 1949 to today is in fact ... . This is important because a prolonged false belief in economic decline can redirect scarce resources away from the pursuit of spiritual endeavours which - given our position in Mazlow's hierarchy - are those of greatest importance in the present era".
The point about the specific morality of different periods is valid, but also points directly to how "morality" is being changed. This is indirectly alluded to in noting that various standards and behavior concerning racial bias, religion etc have lapsed but it does not automatically follow that modern "moral" practices are superior. They are just different.
It does also appear - very obviously to such as myself or those who similarly do not share PMC "morality" - that said modern standards are defined as being inferior to the past.
A simple generic example would be marijuana use. While I personally don't care about marijuana use one way or the other - the fact is that the laws governing its use have been under assault for decades and the 49% referenced are *all* breaking federal law still.
Yes, people drank alcohol too when it was illegal by Constitutional amendment 100 years ago - but they didn't pretend it was moral.
Is there a reality of social scientists talking themselves stupid? This is a good example in a long litany clearly and obviously silly work being published. I truly see it as some of the most base and clearly biased nonsense which is akin to a toddler whose face is covered in cookie crumbs insisting that it isn’t and they don’t know what happened to the cookies.
The nuclear article opens with a similar set of conceits about the apparently super powerful anti nuclear activists who stopped a giant industry in its tracks. It just sounds so dumb when thinking about all the other ways in which everyday activists have failed to stop powerful industries, even after clear and large scale harms have been inflicted on them and their children. When we engage in intentionally obtuse and extreme thinking in isolation about observing anti nuclear activists, dropping public approval polls, and the failure of the nuclear industry to expand…then it is obvious to them how a story shapes up of ultra powerful activists who the government listened to and enacted laws to do what they wanted before anything bad happened to anyone. As if!
Except you know…how this almost never happens in any other topic. Could it be…nuclear actually is unsafe?! Hard, expensive, impossible to ensure commercially, and involves extreme transportation risks if larger amounts of material were being moved around? Hmmm, this thinking in isolation is truly absurd. I call this taking themselves stupid. This is the same bone headed nonsense sham logic which calls for and demands published studies on topics like animal intelligence or if babies feel pain. When any mother or anyone who works with animals can tell you the answers to these obvious questions. Nope, get lost thousands of years of experience, the real arrogance of the self appointed experts are now on the scene to ‘study’ things.
Yes indeed if you check in with common people, they can be trusted and are correct about their own lives and beliefs. This gating off of knowledge behind ‘expertise’ is absurd. The intellectual crime of credentialism and incredulous attitudes towards anything outside their own contrived orthodoxies is a plague on progress and a waste of resources.
I don't know whether people are behaving worse. I do think that there are more people speaking against conventional morality than there used to be.
I've tried to edit this twice, and substack has immorally made the comment disappear.
Security has costs. Locking and unlocking a door takes time repeatedly. Losing a key or other similar failures takes more time, and it's unpredictable.
In cold climates, people seem less likely to lock their doors, presumably because they don't want to leave their neighbors outside to freeze.
When I lived in Newark, Delaware (a medium-sized college town), there was a while when, if I mentioned it, people would get angry at me. I'm not sure why, but I think it was because they didn't want to hear me complaining if I got burglarized.
Thinking about the connotations of "moral decline", shoplifting has become an organized crime project rather than just individual decisions. Shoplifting has become a much more serious problem, but I don't think people think of organized crime taking up shoplifting as moral decline. Or do they?
As, e.g., http://www.fairlynerdy.com/what-is-r-squared/ explains, R^2 can be negative. The Supplement Table S3 reports 3 of the 107 items with a negative R^2:
p 54 item 79 General Social Survey R^2 = -0.004
p 61 item 104 European Social Survey R^2 = -0.00006
p 62 item 107 European Social Survey, R^2 = -0.0001.
In the article on p 2, an adjusted R^2 = -0.002.
But given the context, it seemed worth checking on the "-0.006."
[By the way, the paper was cited by Conor Friedersdorf at https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/06/the-battle-over-smartphones-at-school/674338/. Perhaps this has already been noted.]
Marriage has declined.
Fewer people get married. They get married later. And it ends in divorce far more often.
In 1950, what % of children under the age of 18 were living with both married biological parents? What is that % in 2020?
This plus probably the #1 thing people notice. There is no fudging it.
Even those social classes that partially reversed (but didn’t completely repair) the divorce rate did so mainly by delaying marriaige and having well below replacement fertility. People in 1950 were having 2.5 kids young and still keeping it together.
If the lack of chastity wasn’t correlated (causing?) the lack of stable marraige people wouldn’t care, but many see them as linked.
https://fantlab.ru/autor74643
Скотт Александер (Scott Alexander)
The last part about peoples standard being what was imprinted on them is very interesting to me
A question that poses me is; how does people change standards sometimes? I know some people do. Is this just very uncommon?
I think we are quite a bit more moral now than 1977, the year of my birth. I have to imagine that lots of my generation would agree.
> They mention in the text that these kinds of questions did better than others; 50% report improved treatment of gay people. But what are the other 50% thinking??! The answer has to be something like “2002 to 2013 is too short a time to measure even extremely large effects that were centered around exactly this period”.
Well, presumably some of them are thinking "the amount of 'respect and courtesy' that must be extended to gays now is well in excess of what would be appropriate, which is a change for the negative compared to the past". Increased respect and courtesy aren't automatically good things. The question was whether things have gotten better or worse, not more or less courteous.
The last paragraph in their discussion is interesting. They discuss how the illusion of moral decline could lead to what, for lack of a better term, seems to be in their eyes actual moral decline “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.”
Then they end by saying “ Achieving a better understanding of this phenomenon would seem a timely task.”
If their thesis is correct, then there’s nothing “timely” about this task- the illusion of moral decline has been affecting human society for more than 2000 years, including in the periods where we founded democracies, abolished slavery, and fought Hitler. If this illusion had been getting people to focus on imaginary problems and choose bad leaders, then it has been doing so throughout history , well before the 2016 US election.
It's easy to notice what has gotten worse -- e.g., when it comes to spectacular crimes, there are more school shootings and other mass shootings than when I was a kid in the 1960s-1970s. On the other hand, there appear to now be fewer political assassinations, bombings, skyjackings, kidnappings for ransom, and bank robberies. But it's hard to remember what isn't around much anymore.
Growing up in Los Angeles, for example, RFK was assassinated at L.A.'s most famous old hotel the night he won the Democratic California primary when I was nine, the Manson Murders of Sharon Tate and friends were a few miles away when I was ten, and the LAPD burned down the Symbionese Liberation Army's house (but kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst wasn't there) when I was 15.
Was Los Angeles crazier around 1970 than it is today? I'd guess ... probably, but then who really knows? I'm not as entertained by the local news as when I was a kid, so I can't really compare fairly.
Trust and tolerance are inversely proportional. As social tolerance for differences improves trust in society declines. Trust is a function of being able to understand what others around you are thinking, which is hurt by tolerance of differences of upbringing.
Moral decline sounds like it fits: All the mature decent old people keep dying off and being replaced by these immature babies with no self-control. Been happening forever, kinda weird.
There has been moral progress due to advancements in science, technology and knowledge. There is less suffering today than in the past and more flourishing.
Re footnote 4 - That's kind of the point of Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" - liberals don't realize some people have more moral "flavors" than care and fairness. So they can ask people about morality and not think about other things like tradition, sanctity, etc.
It doesn't sound like a very good study, but I don't think the perception of declining morality has much to do with declining morality however it is "measured". There are two ways to interpret all those reports of declining morality for the last several thousand years. Nehemiah anyone? Morality can indeed have been declining since the Garden of Eden or Olduvai Gorge or many, possibly most, people in every age have had a sense of declining morality. That latter should not be a surprise. We are taught in every society to develop a moral sense of what is right and what is wrong. It's part of our training to live in human society, and I can't think of a culture that doesn't frame human behavior in terms of moral judgement. Despite this, no society has ever lived up to its moral precepts. People aren't easily programmable robots, and moral codes are always full of conflicts, contradictions and compromises. Thou shalt not kill, unless you serve in the military in which you might get a medal for killing or executed for failing to do so. That means, as people age and experience life as adults, they are exposed to a world far from that about which they were taught. Most people do follow their childhood moral precepts to some extent. Society would be much worse than it is without that. However, almost all of us wind up compromising on some points. Worse, many people violate those precepts but only some of them are punished while others thrive. If you don't have a sense of declining morality as one ages, you are either extremely well grounded or simply oblivious.
P.S. I was reading a study, "The Age of Anxiety Birth Cohort Change in Anxiety and Neuroticism, 1952-1993", which addresses anxiety in teenagers. "The average American child in the 1980s reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s." More recent reports on the adolescent anxiety suggest that the trend has continued, though, I'll add cynically, with climate change replacing nuclear war as the big bad. I'm sure my parents were all relaxed and mellow when war broke out in Europe and Asia during the Great Depression and great^N grandparents positively euphoric in the face of the Revolutions of 1848 and American Civil. As with adults facing declining morality, could it be that adolescence is a time of anxiety?
Isn't some or other kind of Moral Decline the eventual fate of every civilisation? https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
>In the 60s, in the city center, they felt comfortable walking alone at night. Now, in the suburbs, still they feel comfortable walking alone at night.
Except the proportion of people living in cities went up since the 60s, not down. (Maybe suburbs are being lumped in with urban here, so I could be wrong about the urban/suburban split vs urban/rural split.) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percentage-of-US-population-living-in-rural-and-urban-areas-from-the-years-1800-to_fig2_320207578
ROPE and HDI are Bayesian statistical terms. ROPE = Range of practical equivalence. HDI = Highest density interval.
The gist of it is that you pick a minimum effect size that you would be willing to consider interesting, the authors of this paper chose +/- 0.1 standard deviations which I believe is the value Kruschke recommended for very conservative analyses (See the Kruschke paper from 2012 titled something to the effect of "Bayesian analysis is better than T-tests, you stupid losers" for more on this).
You then permute different values from posterior distributions of group means and sample standard deviations to produce a sort of ad hoc posterior distribution of effect size.
The HDI is the smallest portion of this effect size distribution whose integral is equal to 0.95. In theory (and if I remember correctly), the percent of the HDI that falls outside of the ROPE is roughly equal to the percent chance of a significant result.
The fact that the authors chose a ROPE of +/- 0.1 is a point in their favor since they're really setting the bar low for a significant result. However, this method still relies on a lot of steps that are susceptible to researcher bias and I'd have to read more of their paper than I have time to in order to get a good grip on how trustworthy their work is.
I will say, when I studied this method several years ago the first thing I said to the person reading the Kruschke paper with me was something like "Wow, somebody could definitely use this to bamboozle a paper reviewer into publishing nonsense one day if they wanted to."