The illusion of moral decline

A repost from Adam Mastroianni.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.

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So I don’t know Adam Mastroianni, but I am thankful to the person who pointed me toward his Substack. Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist who tackles big questions in his research and has a canny way of explaining his findings. This piece is revealing about where we’re at in terms of “moral decline” in this country. I think this post gives you a taste of how fun — but serious — his writing is.

Some of my favorite bits from his post (each is not connected to the next):

First, we don’t see any change in the proportion of people perceiving decline over time. That is, just as many people say that morality has declined today as they did a generation ago.

So it really seems like most humans believe that morality has declined. But look, all of these questions are a little weird. They ask about “morality” but don’t say what that means. They ask about the past without specifying when in the past. And sometimes the questions are very leading, like: “Do you think moral decline is the number one worst problem of all time, or not?”

And look, it’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.

The illusion of moral decline

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