The world has changed remarkably in the last few decades, so far in a century. During this period the modifications have been radical in more than one aspect, life objectives have been transformed and values have adapted to the course of these cultural variations. What seems immutable in the midst of so much movement, and regardless of what era individuals live in, is the habit of looking to the past with a certain nostalgia. The idealization of what was He Titus Livy historianin times of Roman empirealready wrote: “In the gloomy dawn of our modern days we cannot bear our immoralities nor face the necessary remedies to cure them.”
From ancient to modern times, philosophers and social thinkers often lamented the ugly turns taken by the societies in which they lived, often suggesting (and many still do) that one cause of these almost monstrous turns was due to to one decline in moralityin terms of basic human kindness, honesty and decency.
researchers of the Columbia and Harvard universities (United States) managed to frame this tendency to romanticize the past that shows a good part of the people of the western cultures. Studies include surveys of 12 million people of different age groups and from sixty countries between the years 1956 to 2017. The result: the vast majority of those surveyed believe that there is a moral decline in society, that she would be becoming less honest, supportive, kind and humane.
The items analyzed by the scientists were 177 and the results show that 148 of them (the 84 percent) got a worst ratingcompared to times past.
Based on these results, the researchers raised questions and hypotheses. “Why have so many different people in so many different times and places convinced themselves that their fellow citizens are now less moral than they once were? One possibility is that, in fact, the morality has been declining throughout the world for millennia, declining so steadily and precipitously that people in all ages have been able to observe that decline in the short span of a human lifetime. The other possibility is that the perception of moral decline is a psychological illusion to which people around the world and throughout history have been susceptible.”
Thus, in addition to analyzing the surveys, the researchers dedicated themselves to making a objective analysis of the items to which people responded, and conclude that the perception of regression in the field of morality does not correspond to the facts. For experts, this supposed worsening of the present is a myth, an urban legend. And from there the name that they gave to the paper or scientific document that they published in the traditional scientific journal Nature: “The illusion of moral decline”.
Perceptions
“Do the majority of people in all countries believe that we are worse? Yes. Are they right? Almost certainly not”, sums up the psychologist Adam Mastroiannistudy coordinator.
“Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is decliningwho have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute it both to the decline in the morality of individuals as they age and to the decline in the morality of successive generations -explain Mastroianni and Gilbert in the paper published in Nature-. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not diminished over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena, information-biased exposure and information-biased memorycan produce an illusion of moral decline. In addition, we report studies confirming two of their predictions about the circumstances under which perceptions of moral decline are attenuated, eliminated, or reversed—that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or of people who have lived before the respondent was born.
And they conclude: “Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, enduring, unfounded, and easy to produce. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources, the underutilization of social support, and social influence.
The researchers verified that the answers about society, the neighborhood, the neighborhood, given half a century ago, were similar to those given today. In other words, the big difference lies in how people remember or analyze the past.
The explanations for this reaction are, according to the researchers, several. One of them has to do with a basic memory mechanism reported by the Italian philosopher and semiologist Humberto Eco succinctly and brilliantly: “Neither individual memory nor collective memory are photographs of what really happened. They are reconstructions. Memories do not bring an objective, exact and perennial picture of what happened once, but a reconstruction that is reaffirmed each time the person remembers (even more so if they relate what happened to another person). That is to say, memory is the account of part of what happenedand always under the influence of the subjectivity of the person who narrates.
On the other hand, people tend to take in and retain a greater amount of negative information from the present, especially when the situation involves unknown individuals. Scientists call this “biased exposure.” With the past, the movement is the reverse, because what is not good tends to be erased from memory. He balance of these two synchronized movements is, on the one hand, strong pessimism in relation to the here and now and, on the other, one too strong romanticization of times that will never return.
memory tricks
“Over the years, in the imagination of people, negative events are relativized and evil loses evil more quickly than good loses goodness.”, explains Mastroianni.
When people affirm that society in the past was built on pillars of solidarity, kindness, and more loving relationships, they are overlooking such tremendous episodes as bloody dictatorships, world wars, famines that cost the lives of millions of human beings. And, although many of those interviewed recognized changes and advances such as the rights won by oppressed racial minorities, sexual diversities, and women, they consider them “exceptions” in the face of a “humanity” that has worsened.
This feeling that the past was always better and a witness to higher moral values It occurs both among those who were born and raised in a dictatorship and among those who did so in democracies. The idealization of the past tends to occur in all social classes and regardless of the recent history of each country. In fact, the Pew Research Center (of the United States) surveyed citizens of 40 countries in 2002 and 2006, Argentina among them, and in each of those countries, the majority of participants reported that moral decline was a “moderately large problem” (see map).
Mastroianni summarizes: “People believe that morality is declining. Is it so? Societies keep (or at least leave) reasonably good records of grossly immoral conduct, such as killing and conquest, enslavement and subjugation, or murder and rape, and careful analysis of those historical records strongly suggests that these objective indicators of immorality have declined significantly in recent years. the last centuries. On average, modern humans treat each other much better than their ancestors, which is not what one would expect if honesty, kindness, kindness, and kindness had steadily declined, year after year, for millennia. Although there are no equally objective historical records of everyday morality (of how often people offer their seats to an elderly person, give directions to a lost tourist, or help their neighbor fix a fence), there are subjective measures of such things”.
In other words, this feeling that “we are worse” is not, according to the research, a real perception, but a cognitive bias that is altering people’s view of the world.
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