Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
This feels like one of those “QUESTIONS” I need to make a list of and hack away at. Are we collectively getting better or worse? Is humanity naturally cooperative or selfish. followup questions
Highlights
id652573712
on 86.21% of the items, the majority of participants also reported that morality had declined. This finding indicates that people across the world share a belief in the decline of morality.
id652573757
researchers found evidence that people attributed the moral decline to both the decreasing morality of individuals over time and the decreasing morality of successive generations. The researchers then analyzed data from surveys conducted over a 55-year period that had asked participants to report on various aspects of current morality. The results indicated that people’s assessments of the current morality of their contemporaries did not change significantly over time. The year in which the survey was conducted explained less than 1% of the variance in responses, suggesting that any changes in reported morality were negligible at best. In other words, there was no evidence that morality was actually in decline.
✏️ For all the consistent sense of moral decline, when asked about people’s moralities year after year, there was no significant change in it. There was no decline 🔗 View Highlight
id652573847
Mastroianni also noted that a study published last year, which analyzed 511 studies conducted over the course of 61 years, found evidence that cooperative behavior had actually increased over time.
✏️ The opposite seems to be true as well, perception-wise 🔗 View Highlight
id652574103
“Previous researchers have found that cooperation rates in these games actually increased about 10 percentage points from 1956 to 2017. When we asked participants to estimate that change and paid them a bonus for getting it right, they thought that cooperation had fallen by about 10 percentage points.”
✏️ Here’s where we see the dissonance between reality and perception. Cooperation rates in reality increased, but when asking people to estimate how cooperation rates have changed, they perceived that it had decreased. 🔗 View Highlight
id652573527
The authors proposed a mechanism called the “biased exposure and memory” (BEAM) to explain why people perceived moral decline despite evidence to the contrary. This mechanism suggests that biased exposure to negative information about current morality and biased memory for positive information about past morality can create an illusion of moral decline. The tendency to focus on negative information and the selective recall of positive events from the past work together to shape people’s perception of moral change.
✏️ we focus on the negative in the now (think how we absorb the news), and we selectively remember the positive in the past (e.g. nostalgia). That creates an illusion of things always having been better in the past. Psychology 🔗 View Highlight
id652573508
They found that when participants were asked to rate the moral change among people in their personal worlds rather than people in general, they tended to report moral improvement over time, suggesting a reversal of the illusion of moral decline.
id652573483
When participants were asked to rate the morality of people in general in the years before they were born, they tended to perceived moral decline in the years after their birth but not before, supporting the idea that biased memory contributes to the illusion of moral decline.