Hanna Rosen’s Radio Atlantic interview “Are You Plagued by the Feeling That Everyone Used to Be Nicer?” points to recently-published research by Adam Mastroianni, a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia Business School with a recent PhD in Psychology from Harvard and a Rhodes Scholar. His latest paper (co-authored with Daniel T. Gilbert), “The illusion of moral decline,” was published by Nature last month. It is, alas, filled with a goodly number of formulas that will be indecipherable to those not trained in statistics.
He talks about it with Rosen but the back-and-forth conversation is challenging to excerpt. He also blogs about it at his Substack, which is a more straightforward presentation.
The setup:
This paper was born out of spite. For my whole life, I’ve listened to people bemoan the demise of human goodness. “Used to be you could trust a man’s word,” “Back in the day, you didn’t have to lock your doors at night,” “People don’t care for one another anymore,” etc.
This drives me nuts, because people are often wrong about how the present differs from the past. In another paper, I asked people to estimate how public opinion had shifted over time on a bunch of different issues, and they were really bad at it. Not just randomly bad, like a bunch of people throwing darts at a board and most of them missing the bullseye. They were biased—they usually thought attitudes had shifted more than they really had, or they even got the direction of change wrong. That’s like everybody’s darts landing six feet north of the target.
So whenever people make sweeping claims about how the present is different from the past, I wanna grab ‘em by the lapels and shake ‘em: “How do you know?? Did you, like, watch a season of Mad Men? Did you hear some random anecdote from your grandpa? Or is this coming from something you half-remember from your ninth grade social studies class? People spend years trying to figure these things out, but you can just kinda intuit it???”
They compiled a comprehensive list of surveys and found that, rather consistently, people think that people have become less honest, less kind, etc. than they used to be:
There’s a strange consistency: the number saying that morality has declined has remained consistent for decades and people think it has declined more over the past 50 years than the past 10 years or 20 years. This isn’t just an American phenomenon—they found the same thing looking at surveys from 59 other countries. So, it’s a general human trait, not a function of the American political or media environment.
Once again, two interesting additional findings popped out of the data. First, you might think that “morality is declining!” is the kind of thing only an old person would say. But nope; young people say it too. When you ask people about moral decline over the course of their whole lives, older people say there’s been more. When you divide that amount by people’s age, however, you get the same number. That is, older and younger people agree on the rate of moral decline[.]
Second, you might think “morality is declining!” is a thing only conservatives say. Nope; liberals say it too. Conservatives perceived more decline than liberals, but even the strongest liberals agreed it was happening.
The funny thing is, there’s just no basis for these beliefs. First, as Mastroianni notes, the social trends are in the opposite direction.
One big strike against this idea is that, for pretty much any awful thing you can think of—war, murder, slavery, child abuse, etc.—people seem to do less of it now than they used to. If morality has been in freefall for decades or even centuries, it’s a bit odd that people don’t squish each other’s skulls as much as they once did.
Not the mention things like racism, sexism, and homophobia. They’re not gone, to be sure, but they’re generally trending in the right direction.
For decades, survey companies have been asking people questions about their experiences with everyday morality, like, “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” and “Are people generally helpful, or are they looking out for themselves?” and “In the past month, have you helped a stranger who needed help?”
If, as participants in Part I claimed, morality has been falling for decades, it should be pretty easy to find changes in people’s answers to these questions.
It turns out to be very hard to find changes in people’s answers to these questions. We found 107 surveys that were administered to over 4.4 million people between 1965 and 2020. We did some statistical tests to check whether there were any meaningful changes in people’s responses over time. We found none. Sometimes these moral indicators went up a little bit, sometimes they went down a little bit, but on average they went nowhere at all. For instance, here’s one from Gallup:
Note that every single year, in the same survey, about 70% of people say that morality is getting worse. So every year people give the same answer, and every year people say it’s worse than it was before.
They look at several other surveys asking questions like “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” and “Are people generally helpful, or are they lookout out for themselves?” and find shockingly similar answers year by year by year. And the “generally helpful” survey data go all the way back to 1972 with very little variation.
This goes on for another 104 surveys. We also searched for sources outside the US, and found 33 surveys with a combined sample size of over 7.3 million. These, too, showed no change over time.
In addition to survey data, we have other evidence.
Social scientists have, for decades, brought people into the lab and asked them to play “economic games” like the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Public Goods Game. (“Game” is a generous term for these; basically you make some decisions and get some money, or not. This is economists’ idea of fun.)
Last year, a team led by Mingliang Yuan tracked down as many of these studies as they could find, and then checked whether cooperation rates had changed over time. They expected to find that people are more likely to be selfish today. Instead, they found the opposite: cooperation rates increased about 10 percentage points from 1956 to 2017. Obviously, these games present people with pretty weird situations; they are not an objective peek into humans’ heart of hearts. But if you believe in moral decline, it’s hard to explain why people seem to be more willing to cooperate.
Maybe, though, people would get this one right. If you explained a Prisoner’s Dilemma to participants, told them that you know how cooperation rates have changed over time, and paid them a bonus for estimating the change in those rates correctly, do they nail it?
They do not nail it. When we did all those things, people estimated that cooperation had decreased by 10 percentage points. That is, they got the amount of change right, but the wrong direction. So even when money is on the line, even when we don’t use squishy terms like “morality,” and even when we can compare people’s perceptions directly to reality, we still find a sizable illusion of moral decline.
So, people have consistently believed that morality (again, measured in all manner of ways) has been in decline at a macro level but neither the macro nor micro level data support this. What explains this? After listing some obvious points, they get to the main findings:
Biased exposure means that things always look outrageous: murder and arson and fraud, oh my! Biased memory means the outrages of yesterday don’t seem so outrageous today. When things always look bad today but brighter yesterday, congratulations pal, you got yourself an illusion of moral decline.
Which makes sense. And it means there’s a disconnect with how people perceive the state of the society and their personal life.
In another study, we asked people to answer those same questions about interpersonal replacement and personal change that we asked in a previous study, first about people in general, and then about people that they interact with on a daily basis. When we asked participants about people in general, they said (a) people overall are less moral than they were in 2005, (b) the same people are less moral today than in 2005 (personal change) and (c) young people today are less moral than older people were in 2005 (interpersonal replacement). Just as they did before, participants told us that morality declined overall, and that both personal change and interpersonal replacement were to blame.
But we saw something new when we asked participants about people they know personally. First, they said individuals they’ve known for the past 15 years are more moral today. They said the young folks they know today aren’t as moral as the old folks they knew 15 years ago, but this difference was smaller than it was for people in general. So when you ask people about a group where they probably don’t have biased exposure—or at least not biased negative exposure—they report less moral decline, or even moral improvement.
And this is rather amusing:
The second thing that BEAM predicts is that if you turn off biased memory, the illusion of moral decline might go away. We figured this could happen if you asked people about times before they were born—you can’t have memories if you weren’t alive. We reran one of our previous studies, simply asking participants to rate people in general today, the year in which they turned 20, the year in which they were born, 20 years before that, and 40 years before that.
People said, basically, “moral decline began when I arrived on Earth”[.]
Mastroianni is a very young scholar; indeed, he began his graduate studies the year Donald Trump was elected President. And this very much influences his research interests. This research helps explain the power of “Make America Great Again” and similar populist appeals.
[I]t’s fine to have strong opinions about things that you know nothing about—that’s kind of what the internet is for. But it’s not fine when those strong opinions lead to demands for actual changes in the world. If you think that morality is declining, then you must think that some switch has been flipped in society, causing it to produce worse humans. No doubt you would want to un-flip that switch, whatever you think it is: smash the social media companies! Kill all the politicians! Ban the bad books! None of that is going to reverse the trend, because the trend doesn’t exist. It’s like activating the sprinkler system in a building that’s not on fire.
(This is exactly what aspiring despots do, by the way: they cry catastrophe as a way of justifying their extreme measures. “Things are going to hell, but make me king and I’ll fix it all.”)
As noted, things are actually generally improving. Case in point, experts seem to think the 2020 general election was exceptionally well run and honest. As Mastrionni said,
(This is exactly what aspiring despots do, by the way: they cry catastrophe as a way of justifying their extreme measures. “Things are going to hell, but make me king and I’ll fix it all.”)
It’s because when we’re kids, most of us are protected from a lot of the unpleasant realities of the world. As we become adults we start becoming aware of them, and we subconciously assume this means that the things we are becoming aware of are new (and thus the world is getting worse) rather than things that have always been happening and we just weren’t aware of them until now.
I’ve heard this phenomenon explained also by the fact that our memories of our childhood reflect the way we as children saw the world.
That is, as children we saw a world whose ugliness was concealed by our parents, so in our memory everything was pleasant and everyone was nice but as we aged, our eyes began to see more and more of what was always there.
@Stormy Dragon: No, it s not because of when kid, it is rather more broad, fundamental and profound memory bias (as one can obtain from actually reading the post of course).
Nothing particularly surprising in this, the Decline From Golden Age perception is observable in human writing since the Ancients (Greece, Rome) – a period where one would be quite the fool to think kids were particularly “insulated” (never mind as well the effect is seen in other cultural situations where again the comfortable BoBo Left American cultural habits to not obtain nor apply)
@Stormy Dragon: No, it s not because of when kid, it is rather more broad, fundamental and profound memory bias (as one can obtain from actually reading the post of course).
Nothing particularly surprising in this, the Decline From Golden Age perception is observable in human writing since the Ancients (Greece, Rome) – a period where one would be quite the fool to think kids were particularly “insulated” (never mind as well the effect is seen in other cultural situations where again the comfortable BoBo Left American cultural habits to not obtain nor apply)
So, it’s a general human trait, not a function of the American political or media environment.
Indeed, the ancient Greeks complained about the youth.
The other is biased memory: the negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information
This reminds me of a conversation my wife and I had in Bogota, Colombia with another ex-pat while we all were living there. He had lived aboard off and of and we were talking about some of the harder elements of living in another country. And he noted, “some day you’ll only think about the good parts” and he was largely correct.
BTW, great post and what a great study. I have to admit, “kids these days” or pining for the “good ol’ days” are amongst the peeviest of my pet peeves.
I must be weird, because I remember all the ways things were worse. There was far more violence (tho there seems to be an increase in gun violence, it would not surprise me in the least if that is just the media running front page stories on it every day), racism was everybody’s daily reality (amazing the number of white people my age who say they never got a leg up because they were white), drugs…. It might not be much better than it used to be, but the smoking area at my HS was an open air market where everything imaginable was for sale, and speaking of smoking areas, hows about the improvements in health from that source alone? Homophobia… Don’t even get me started on that one. Birth control, boy do I remember when that hit the market, my Southern Baptist turned Catholic mother marched each of my sister’s to the OB/Gyn as soon as they had their first period, not to mention how the job market has improved for them. I could go on, and on, and on…
Or is this coming from something you half-remember from your ninth grade social studies class?
The older I get (and I am officially old) the more I question my mind’s motives when developing an opinion on the current state of the world.Influencers? Cryptocurrency? A.I.? Are they weird or scary because they are or because I just don’t like the idea of them?
I will say, with some certainty, that the “smart phone “ era is quite the mixed bag in a social context. Personally, I don’t use my iPhone for anything other than for texting and phoning. It is not an extra appendage. I really dislike it when some think they should be able to reach me anytime they want.
Overall, these times are different than most others because of the rapid ascension of technology and the connectivity that provided along side the accelerated deterioration of the climate. Bad news travels fast.
What I find fascinating is the stability over time of these numbers. I’m not sure this is just the sheltered child effect, given that not everyone had a happy childhood, and a great many kids are unhappy through their school years then find adulthood liberating and empowering.
Of course after the liberating and the empowering of your 20’s comes the recognition that most of life’s problems are intractable and this realization coincides with moving into one’s 30’s and then (time’s arrow being a one way sign) the disappointing 40’s, the red sports car and a mistress 50’s, the gathering dread of the 60’s, the fatalistic shuffle toward death of your 70’s… The slow fading of hope, the gradual recognition of helplessness of, may I say, impotence, weakness, illness and finally, death. . . death. . . death.
I must be weird, because I remember all the ways things were worse.
Absolutely. I would not trade any decade of my life for a previous one. (Although, I just hit 69 a couple days ago, so I reserve the right to change that position.) I compare my kid’s high schools (classes of 2012-ish) to mine, and wow, the number of staff laboring to keep them going in school was astonishing to me. They were so coddled. I never even knew if we had a guidance counselor and when I quit no one gave a single fuck.
I dunno. I was going into the grocery store the other day and an old lady carrying 2 bags mowed me down, didn’t move out of my way, then dropped her groceries and expected me to help her pick them up. The world just isn’t what it used to be [kidding, I’m one who believes the world is progressively becoming a better place as we conquer each challenge over time]
The complaints I hear about younger people are not about them being immoral, but rather that they seem adrift in the transactional and insincere. Lack of eye contact, total inability to trust feelings and intuitions, no social choreography, that sort of thing. I get where it’s coming from. Our society is weird and like the Greeks we are into youth, but unlike the Greeks, we’re into escapism and comics and not sex.
And I don’t know what datasets about cooperation taken from Prisoner’s Dilemma prove. When many people talk about morality, they are talking about knowing, about intuition, faith, meaning, experience. Saul on the way to Damascus thrown from the horse, struck blind, tended to by a member of the sect he was persecuting, and then becoming Paul. He didn’t get back on his horse, head to Damascus, and try to negotiate a better way to deal with the sect, whose views he had gathered respect for after three days of an ‘interesting dialogue’.
1. Damn fine piece of research.
2. Wonder how much of this is the “when I was a kid, I didn’t know about this because nobody told me” vs. people thinking “change” == “degrading morals”.
3. This reminds me how people are making a fuss about the “prevalence” of estranged families and “how it is so much worse than it used to be.” No it isn’t, you zit-heads. It’s just that now you’ve got that thing called a smartphone, so that when you’re blocked (or blocking someone) it’s now really really obvious. Previously, people who couldn’t get along with their families would just….move away and make a new life elsewhere. The lack of communication would be chalked up to “difficulties in communication” (oh, my boy is out somewhere in Wyoming….) rather than the fact that the individuals involved couldn’t stand each other.
Based on stories within my own family, I suspect the percentage of estranged family members hasn’t changed over time. It may be that we’re talking about it more, but that’s a different matter….
I was 6 years old in 1954 when this country started it’s descent into hell.
The first issue of Playboy? No. That was December of 1953.
1954 was the year Congress added the words “under god” to the pledge of allegiance.
We have been in a moral tailspin ever since.
@becca: Influencers? Cryptocurrency? A.I.? Are they weird or scary because they are or because I just don’t like the idea of them?
Because I don’t like them I just tune it all out and thank dawg I’m going to be dead soon. As far as smart phones go, I refuse to have a phone that is smarter than me.
@Michael Reynolds: Mostly agree with both your comments. My best years were my post divorce 30s and early 40s. I was as free as I wanted to be (with the exception of my sons). I was doing my best caving, traveling a whole lot, making enough money when I worked that getting laid off was just a good reason to go see someplace new. In my 50s I came face to face with the fact that my body could no longer keep up with that pace and by the time I was 57 I had to give up working. They’ve been mostly good years since (my 2nd marriage, getting my sons off on their own paths) but it comes with the certain knowledge that I will never again be able to do so many things I loved, and a lot of pain.
That’s OK, life continues and I find new things to occupy my time.
When people tell me things used to be better I ask them to give me a date or dates and for whom it was better. It’s very easy to point out things that were worse in any given period. If they specify for white males only then it was clearly sort of better in the past, but only if you didnt care about wives and daughters.
In 1974 a book was published called, The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible! and it is still in print. Lots of little American vignettes, like adulterated food, brothels, corrupt cops….
For extra credit, note that if you assemble a mixed group of liberals and conservatives, both groups believe firmly that their side has lost relative ground over the last N years, and that’s why morality is in decline. This is why I hate the poll question “do you believe that America/the government/society is moving in the correct direction?” so much — it’s impossible to interpret the answer in terms of policy preferences.
If your notion of “morality” includes keeping women/heretics/queers/brown people in their place, then the perception of decline is not illusory. Thank Zuul.
BTW, great post and what a great study. I have to admit, “kids these days” or pining for the “good ol’ days” are amongst the peeviest of my pet peeves.
It’s not the kids that scare me, it’s the old people, and I think they are getting worse.
MAGA, QAnon, God botherers… those aren’t the kids. I remember when hate wasn’t a virtue, and when compromise wasn’t weakness. I’m old enough to notice that more and more of my peer group has slid off into embracing the horrible people that they are rather than trying to be better.
I remember when Nazis mostly hid themselves away, and they weren’t being overtly courted by either political party.
Well, it’s been observed that many will participate in the “moral decline” but still have a negative view of it. Such as is related by this historian in a 1989 interview on how in the early college students had “do it” but still did not approve of “premarital sex”.
And the thing is, Pew Research came out with a study of the percentage of people who were “never married” at age 40. It’s an interesting dip in the early/mid 20th century. The rate was 16% in 1910, declined to bottoming out in 1960/70, with only 6% of 40 yr olds never married in 1980 (those born in 1940). Then the rate increases crossing 16% in 2000, that would be late Boomers and was 25% in 2021.
A couple weeks ago Erik Loomis, as part of his series, visited the grave of Howard Johnson. The key to his success franchising restaurants, and later motels, was that while his product may not have been wonderful, it was OK, while local places were at best a crapshoot.
This was a time when the quality of American sweets really did vary from vendor to vendor. Most of the time, I mean, it just flat out wasn’t as good as it would be today. One point to consider that matters about Johnson’s life a lot is that there was never some time when Americans ate high quality homemade food and bought local and knew where their eggs and dairy and whatever came from before Big Food came along and destroyed it. That’s a total myth, one that serves present food movements quite well, but one as completely mythological as visions of the 50s that spouses slept in separate beds like on TV shows of the era. Sure, of course there was good food around. But a lot of it was not. … Same principle as food really. You simply didn’t know what you were going to get by stopping in a random place, You knew what you would get at HoJos.
IIRC Holiday Inn was the same deal. People were starting to travel by car a lot and local hotels/motels could be good or horrible, Holiday Inn was a known quantity.
Also too, I tested. If I use my new email I can use any handle, so I’m back to 08.
I do think it’s true that people used to dress more appropriately for work, travel, going out to dinner, etc.
More likely, the notion of “appropriate” has shifted. There was a time when “appropriate” meant a tuxedo. Then it meant a suit. Then it meant slacks and a polo. Now, it can be shorts, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap.
Because I grew up somewhere in the period when we were shifting from suits to slacks and polos, I find the current modality “inappropriate” and sloppy. But earlier generations thought that of the slack and polos and earlier generations still pined for the days when people wore tuxes after 6.
Plus, there’s no longer a monoculture so lots of different classes, ethnicities, etc. are contributing to the notion of what’s “appropriate” to wear (and how to act) in public.
@Stormy Dragon: The internet had a similar effect on everyone. Prior to the internet news sources were generally highly localized. Post internet you can read in real time the experience of someone pooping in the amazon….
So yeah the unpleasant news thing got cranked to 11 and the older people still haven’t adjusted to this reality.
@OzarkHillbilly: Aye I had much the same experience as you. I don’t have the “good ol days” to look back on because even as a child things sucked around me. I’m just glad I found some common childhood statements like “n***er rigging” and various antisemitic ones were actually racists and uh antisemitic. Even today I still have to stop myself from saying someone j33ed me…
@JKB: I cannot help but wonder if the dip in “never married by age 40” in the middle of the 20th century was correlated with attitudes towards gays and lesbians.
I cannot help reading “never married by age 40” as “confirmed bachelor” or “spinster women living together” — the genteel closet — and speculate that the “gays, Jews and communists” propaganda ramped up with the successes of the labor movement and the efforts to discredit it.
@James Joyner: I’ve read that sport coats have pockets because you need a handy place to keep the shotgun shells.
The single thing that has changed the most is men wearing hats. Take this picture from the early 20th century. This from a working class bar, and not a nice one. Aside from the fact that there are no women and there are no stools at the bar (if you couldn’t stand up any more the bouncer was happy to help you out the door and into the gutter), note that all the men are wearing their hats. This indicates that it wasn’t the type of classy jernt that had a hat check service.
My theory is that the automobile killed the hat. Once rooflines became low enough, hats wouldn’t fit and then where would you put it when you were driving? Even if you didn’t have a passenger and could put it on the bench seat, it would just slide off and end up on the dirty floor mat.
Funny thing, I don’t remember those yester years –
the assassinations of JFK in 1963 and RFK and MLK in 1968, the urban riots of the 1960s, the Vietnam War that ‘ended’ in 1975, the open corruption of Nixon’s Watergate, and the War on Drugs of the 1980’s, to ame very few …
– as the kinder, man’s-word-was-his bond, good old days.
Those ‘good old days’ were and are when we were young, in shape, unencumbered, and relatively free range. No matter that there was and is all kinds of bad stuff going on. As we get older, we remember so much of it as something it wasn’t and isn’t.
Ever since I saw H.G. Wells Things to Come (1936) I’ve been waiting for the day when I can abandon my polo shirt and don the attire of the future in all its sartorial elegance.
There was a great Garrison Keillor monologue about a hog slaughter. In the second have of the monologue he speaks about the olden days and how people view them through rose-colored glasses because our parents and other adults that cared for and about us shielded us from the bad things in the world, so that now when we look back we see a world that was better and kinder, rather than a world where we were protected from the things that were worse and less kind.
But earlier generations thought that of the slack and polos and earlier generations still pined for the days when people wore tuxes after 6.
…if by “people” you mean the wealthy. 95% of Americans didn’t own tuxedos then; the dress code was partly a way of keeping the riff-raff (like you and me) out of fine dining establishments.
When watching “My Fair Lady” my suspension of disbelief can manage that Henry Higgins could teach Eliza Doolittle how to speak like a lady. It boggles at the idea that such a man would both be able to afford to dress her like a lady and would know someone with the necessary skills — and that she would learn how to wear those clothes convincingly.
(never mind as well the effect is seen in other cultural situations where again the comfortable BoBo Left American cultural habits to not obtain nor apply)
@MarkedMan: You know, when I look at that photo, I think, “wow, it looks cold in there”. Maybe it IS cold in there. Maybe they didn’t spend so much on heating the place. Maybe there wasn’t central heating.
Well, the cited study definitely confirms my priors, it must be good!
I was ready to credit the idea of moral decline right up to the point where I learned that the Greeks complained about “kids these days”. With my mathy mind, I did a quick extrapolation and decided that if that trend had continued for 2000 years or more, we’d be acting like crabs in a bucket or something. So, maybe not.
As noted, things are actually generally improving. Case in point, experts seem to think the 2020 general election was exceptionally well run and honest. As Mastrionni said,
It’s because when we’re kids, most of us are protected from a lot of the unpleasant realities of the world. As we become adults we start becoming aware of them, and we subconciously assume this means that the things we are becoming aware of are new (and thus the world is getting worse) rather than things that have always been happening and we just weren’t aware of them until now.
I’ve heard this phenomenon explained also by the fact that our memories of our childhood reflect the way we as children saw the world.
That is, as children we saw a world whose ugliness was concealed by our parents, so in our memory everything was pleasant and everyone was nice but as we aged, our eyes began to see more and more of what was always there.
@Stormy Dragon: No, it s not because of when kid, it is rather more broad, fundamental and profound memory bias (as one can obtain from actually reading the post of course).
Nothing particularly surprising in this, the Decline From Golden Age perception is observable in human writing since the Ancients (Greece, Rome) – a period where one would be quite the fool to think kids were particularly “insulated” (never mind as well the effect is seen in other cultural situations where again the comfortable BoBo Left American cultural habits to not obtain nor apply)
@Stormy Dragon: No, it s not because of when kid, it is rather more broad, fundamental and profound memory bias (as one can obtain from actually reading the post of course).
Nothing particularly surprising in this, the Decline From Golden Age perception is observable in human writing since the Ancients (Greece, Rome) – a period where one would be quite the fool to think kids were particularly “insulated” (never mind as well the effect is seen in other cultural situations where again the comfortable BoBo Left American cultural habits to not obtain nor apply)
Indeed, the ancient Greeks complained about the youth.
This reminds me of a conversation my wife and I had in Bogota, Colombia with another ex-pat while we all were living there. He had lived aboard off and of and we were talking about some of the harder elements of living in another country. And he noted, “some day you’ll only think about the good parts” and he was largely correct.
BTW, great post and what a great study. I have to admit, “kids these days” or pining for the “good ol’ days” are amongst the peeviest of my pet peeves.
Interesting and illuminating! However, I am sure you will all agree that we had the best music.
I must be weird, because I remember all the ways things were worse. There was far more violence (tho there seems to be an increase in gun violence, it would not surprise me in the least if that is just the media running front page stories on it every day), racism was everybody’s daily reality (amazing the number of white people my age who say they never got a leg up because they were white), drugs…. It might not be much better than it used to be, but the smoking area at my HS was an open air market where everything imaginable was for sale, and speaking of smoking areas, hows about the improvements in health from that source alone? Homophobia… Don’t even get me started on that one. Birth control, boy do I remember when that hit the market, my Southern Baptist turned Catholic mother marched each of my sister’s to the OB/Gyn as soon as they had their first period, not to mention how the job market has improved for them. I could go on, and on, and on…
My 9th grade class was full of assholes.
The older I get (and I am officially old) the more I question my mind’s motives when developing an opinion on the current state of the world.Influencers? Cryptocurrency? A.I.? Are they weird or scary because they are or because I just don’t like the idea of them?
I will say, with some certainty, that the “smart phone “ era is quite the mixed bag in a social context. Personally, I don’t use my iPhone for anything other than for texting and phoning. It is not an extra appendage. I really dislike it when some think they should be able to reach me anytime they want.
Overall, these times are different than most others because of the rapid ascension of technology and the connectivity that provided along side the accelerated deterioration of the climate. Bad news travels fast.
What I find fascinating is the stability over time of these numbers. I’m not sure this is just the sheltered child effect, given that not everyone had a happy childhood, and a great many kids are unhappy through their school years then find adulthood liberating and empowering.
Of course after the liberating and the empowering of your 20’s comes the recognition that most of life’s problems are intractable and this realization coincides with moving into one’s 30’s and then (time’s arrow being a one way sign) the disappointing 40’s, the red sports car and a mistress 50’s, the gathering dread of the 60’s, the fatalistic shuffle toward death of your 70’s… The slow fading of hope, the gradual recognition of helplessness of, may I say, impotence, weakness, illness and finally, death. . . death. . . death.
I’m sorry, what were we talking about?
@OzarkHillbilly:
Absolutely. I would not trade any decade of my life for a previous one. (Although, I just hit 69 a couple days ago, so I reserve the right to change that position.) I compare my kid’s high schools (classes of 2012-ish) to mine, and wow, the number of staff laboring to keep them going in school was astonishing to me. They were so coddled. I never even knew if we had a guidance counselor and when I quit no one gave a single fuck.
I dunno. I was going into the grocery store the other day and an old lady carrying 2 bags mowed me down, didn’t move out of my way, then dropped her groceries and expected me to help her pick them up. The world just isn’t what it used to be [kidding, I’m one who believes the world is progressively becoming a better place as we conquer each challenge over time]
The very first thing I thought while reading the post was, “I’ve been hearing this since the 70s.”
For the record, I don’t ever recall not locking the front door, which in our house was the front gate, nor leaving the car unlocked.
@Michael Reynolds:
“When I was in school, guidance counseling meant the coach banged your head against a locker and told you to shape up.” — Robert B. Parker
The complaints I hear about younger people are not about them being immoral, but rather that they seem adrift in the transactional and insincere. Lack of eye contact, total inability to trust feelings and intuitions, no social choreography, that sort of thing. I get where it’s coming from. Our society is weird and like the Greeks we are into youth, but unlike the Greeks, we’re into escapism and comics and not sex.
And I don’t know what datasets about cooperation taken from Prisoner’s Dilemma prove. When many people talk about morality, they are talking about knowing, about intuition, faith, meaning, experience. Saul on the way to Damascus thrown from the horse, struck blind, tended to by a member of the sect he was persecuting, and then becoming Paul. He didn’t get back on his horse, head to Damascus, and try to negotiate a better way to deal with the sect, whose views he had gathered respect for after three days of an ‘interesting dialogue’.
1. Damn fine piece of research.
2. Wonder how much of this is the “when I was a kid, I didn’t know about this because nobody told me” vs. people thinking “change” == “degrading morals”.
3. This reminds me how people are making a fuss about the “prevalence” of estranged families and “how it is so much worse than it used to be.” No it isn’t, you zit-heads. It’s just that now you’ve got that thing called a smartphone, so that when you’re blocked (or blocking someone) it’s now really really obvious. Previously, people who couldn’t get along with their families would just….move away and make a new life elsewhere. The lack of communication would be chalked up to “difficulties in communication” (oh, my boy is out somewhere in Wyoming….) rather than the fact that the individuals involved couldn’t stand each other.
Based on stories within my own family, I suspect the percentage of estranged family members hasn’t changed over time. It may be that we’re talking about it more, but that’s a different matter….
I was 6 years old in 1954 when this country started it’s descent into hell.
The first issue of Playboy? No. That was December of 1953.
1954 was the year Congress added the words “under god” to the pledge of allegiance.
We have been in a moral tailspin ever since.
Because I don’t like them I just tune it all out and thank dawg I’m going to be dead soon. As far as smart phones go, I refuse to have a phone that is smarter than me.
@Michael Reynolds: Mostly agree with both your comments. My best years were my post divorce 30s and early 40s. I was as free as I wanted to be (with the exception of my sons). I was doing my best caving, traveling a whole lot, making enough money when I worked that getting laid off was just a good reason to go see someplace new. In my 50s I came face to face with the fact that my body could no longer keep up with that pace and by the time I was 57 I had to give up working. They’ve been mostly good years since (my 2nd marriage, getting my sons off on their own paths) but it comes with the certain knowledge that I will never again be able to do so many things I loved, and a lot of pain.
That’s OK, life continues and I find new things to occupy my time.
When people tell me things used to be better I ask them to give me a date or dates and for whom it was better. It’s very easy to point out things that were worse in any given period. If they specify for white males only then it was clearly sort of better in the past, but only if you didnt care about wives and daughters.
Steve
In 1974 a book was published called, The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible! and it is still in print. Lots of little American vignettes, like adulterated food, brothels, corrupt cops….
@OzarkHillbilly: Good for you! Certitude has never been my strong point.
For extra credit, note that if you assemble a mixed group of liberals and conservatives, both groups believe firmly that their side has lost relative ground over the last N years, and that’s why morality is in decline. This is why I hate the poll question “do you believe that America/the government/society is moving in the correct direction?” so much — it’s impossible to interpret the answer in terms of policy preferences.
If your notion of “morality” includes keeping women/heretics/queers/brown people in their place, then the perception of decline is not illusory. Thank Zuul.
@Steven L. Taylor:
It’s not the kids that scare me, it’s the old people, and I think they are getting worse.
MAGA, QAnon, God botherers… those aren’t the kids. I remember when hate wasn’t a virtue, and when compromise wasn’t weakness. I’m old enough to notice that more and more of my peer group has slid off into embracing the horrible people that they are rather than trying to be better.
I remember when Nazis mostly hid themselves away, and they weren’t being overtly courted by either political party.
I do think it’s true that people used to dress more appropriately for work, travel, going out to dinner, etc.
Well, it’s been observed that many will participate in the “moral decline” but still have a negative view of it. Such as is related by this historian in a 1989 interview on how in the early college students had “do it” but still did not approve of “premarital sex”.
And the thing is, Pew Research came out with a study of the percentage of people who were “never married” at age 40. It’s an interesting dip in the early/mid 20th century. The rate was 16% in 1910, declined to bottoming out in 1960/70, with only 6% of 40 yr olds never married in 1980 (those born in 1940). Then the rate increases crossing 16% in 2000, that would be late Boomers and was 25% in 2021.
@Richard Gardner:
A couple weeks ago Erik Loomis, as part of his series, visited the grave of Howard Johnson. The key to his success franchising restaurants, and later motels, was that while his product may not have been wonderful, it was OK, while local places were at best a crapshoot.
IIRC Holiday Inn was the same deal. People were starting to travel by car a lot and local hotels/motels could be good or horrible, Holiday Inn was a known quantity.
Also too, I tested. If I use my new email I can use any handle, so I’m back to 08.
@Gustopher:
Happened to see somewhere this morning that half of Trump’s donations comes from retirees.
@CSK:
More likely, the notion of “appropriate” has shifted. There was a time when “appropriate” meant a tuxedo. Then it meant a suit. Then it meant slacks and a polo. Now, it can be shorts, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap.
Because I grew up somewhere in the period when we were shifting from suits to slacks and polos, I find the current modality “inappropriate” and sloppy. But earlier generations thought that of the slack and polos and earlier generations still pined for the days when people wore tuxes after 6.
As someone wrote a while back [UPDATE: it was The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson/a>], pretty much everything we wear today was once “athleisure.” Certainly, the polo was. Ditto the sportcoat, which began as hunting and polo attire.
Plus, there’s no longer a monoculture so lots of different classes, ethnicities, etc. are contributing to the notion of what’s “appropriate” to wear (and how to act) in public.
@Stormy Dragon: The internet had a similar effect on everyone. Prior to the internet news sources were generally highly localized. Post internet you can read in real time the experience of someone pooping in the amazon….
So yeah the unpleasant news thing got cranked to 11 and the older people still haven’t adjusted to this reality.
@OzarkHillbilly: Aye I had much the same experience as you. I don’t have the “good ol days” to look back on because even as a child things sucked around me. I’m just glad I found some common childhood statements like “n***er rigging” and various antisemitic ones were actually racists and uh antisemitic. Even today I still have to stop myself from saying someone j33ed me…
@Kathy:
I actually do remember some house holds that kept their front doors unlocked. I also remember a couple getting robbed…
@JKB: I cannot help but wonder if the dip in “never married by age 40” in the middle of the 20th century was correlated with attitudes towards gays and lesbians.
I cannot help reading “never married by age 40” as “confirmed bachelor” or “spinster women living together” — the genteel closet — and speculate that the “gays, Jews and communists” propaganda ramped up with the successes of the labor movement and the efforts to discredit it.
@Matt:
That’s totally untrue. It’s video, and you have to pay extra for that.
@James Joyner: I’ve read that sport coats have pockets because you need a handy place to keep the shotgun shells.
The single thing that has changed the most is men wearing hats. Take this picture from the early 20th century. This from a working class bar, and not a nice one. Aside from the fact that there are no women and there are no stools at the bar (if you couldn’t stand up any more the bouncer was happy to help you out the door and into the gutter), note that all the men are wearing their hats. This indicates that it wasn’t the type of classy jernt that had a hat check service.
My theory is that the automobile killed the hat. Once rooflines became low enough, hats wouldn’t fit and then where would you put it when you were driving? Even if you didn’t have a passenger and could put it on the bench seat, it would just slide off and end up on the dirty floor mat.
Funny thing, I don’t remember those yester years –
the assassinations of JFK in 1963 and RFK and MLK in 1968, the urban riots of the 1960s, the Vietnam War that ‘ended’ in 1975, the open corruption of Nixon’s Watergate, and the War on Drugs of the 1980’s, to ame very few …
– as the kinder, man’s-word-was-his bond, good old days.
Those ‘good old days’ were and are when we were young, in shape, unencumbered, and relatively free range. No matter that there was and is all kinds of bad stuff going on. As we get older, we remember so much of it as something it wasn’t and isn’t.
@CSK: Still depends on the definition of “appropriately.”
@JKB: Well, that was incoherent. Thanks. (I guess.)
@Matt: I grew up in large-ish city, so I’m fully conditioned to the idea that a door I’m not looking at should be locked.
Ever since I saw H.G. Wells Things to Come (1936) I’ve been waiting for the day when I can abandon my polo shirt and don the attire of the future in all its sartorial elegance.
There was a great Garrison Keillor monologue about a hog slaughter. In the second have of the monologue he speaks about the olden days and how people view them through rose-colored glasses because our parents and other adults that cared for and about us shielded us from the bad things in the world, so that now when we look back we see a world that was better and kinder, rather than a world where we were protected from the things that were worse and less kind.
@CSK:
Dress has gotten more casual over time. Largely it’s the fact informal dress codes in public places are no longer expected, nor enforced most times.
@MarkedMan:
I was under the impression hats were not worn indoors.
@James Joyner:
…if by “people” you mean the wealthy. 95% of Americans didn’t own tuxedos then; the dress code was partly a way of keeping the riff-raff (like you and me) out of fine dining establishments.
When watching “My Fair Lady” my suspension of disbelief can manage that Henry Higgins could teach Eliza Doolittle how to speak like a lady. It boggles at the idea that such a man would both be able to afford to dress her like a lady and would know someone with the necessary skills — and that she would learn how to wear those clothes convincingly.
@Lounsbury:
For crying out loud. What is wrong with you?
@Kurtz: The only thing I can think is he gets too deep in the cups and forgets his ESL.
@Jax:
That’s charitable of you.
@Lounsbury: Over coddling parents who were too protective was literally the Buddha’s origin story.
@James Joyner: There was a time when “appropriate” meant a tuxedo.
Harrumph. Maybe for a stroll in the park when your valet had the day off.
@MarkedMan: The single thing that has changed the most is men wearing hats.
For a long time, hats were a status symbol. Eventually, manufacturing made them ubiquitous. That led to their decline, with a single moment encapsulating the new frontier.
@MarkedMan: You know, when I look at that photo, I think, “wow, it looks cold in there”. Maybe it IS cold in there. Maybe they didn’t spend so much on heating the place. Maybe there wasn’t central heating.
Well, the cited study definitely confirms my priors, it must be good!
I was ready to credit the idea of moral decline right up to the point where I learned that the Greeks complained about “kids these days”. With my mathy mind, I did a quick extrapolation and decided that if that trend had continued for 2000 years or more, we’d be acting like crabs in a bucket or something. So, maybe not.