The perception is morality is in decline, surveys beg to differ

Adam Mastroianni was always bothered by anecdotal claims that people are becoming less kind, respectful and trustworthy over time. So he took a deep dive into such claims: he wrote a PhD dissertation.

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Now Mastroianni and a collaborator have drawn on decades’ worth of survey results and other data to find that people around the world have perceived a general moral decline for at least the past 70 years1. But the data also show that individuals’ evaluation of their contemporaries’ morality has remained largely unchanged during that time. Mastroianni, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York City, and his co-author Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conclude that the perception of moral decline is an illusion.

The findings were published in Nature on 7 June.

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