"People were kinder then"

Here's the most common form of the decline story, and the one that feels most like plain observation. People were kinder. More honest. Held doors. Knew their neighbours. Now look at them.

Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert, in 2023, gathered survey data from around twelve and a half million people, across at least sixty countries, going back seventy years, and asked one question of it. Do people believe that morality is declining? They do. Everywhere, and in every year the surveys were taken, people said that others were less kind and honest than they used to be. Then the researchers looked at what people said about the morality of their contemporaries in each of those years. It hadn't changed. In nineteen fifty-five people rated the people around them at a certain level, and in twenty fifteen people rated the people around them at about the same level, and in both years they said things used to be better. The decline had been reported continuously for seventy years and had never shown up in the measurements of the present.

They proposed a mechanism made of two ordinary things. First, biased exposure. We hear disproportionately about bad behaviour, because that's what gets reported and repeated. Second, biased memory, which is chapter 3's fade. The bad we heard about in the past has cooled, the bad we're hearing about now is hot, so the present looks worse. And they tested two predictions. When people were asked about people they knew well, rather than people in general, the sense of decline shrank. And when asked about the period before they were born, it went. People don't think morality declined between eighteen ninety and nineteen twenty. They think it declined during their own lifetime, whenever that was. The decline tracks the observer, not history.

I'd hold the mechanism loosely, because it's a proposed explanation and the notes say so, but the finding is hard to argue with. Seventy years of people saying the same thing about the same unchanging measurement is not seventy years of decline. It's a permanent feature of how the present looks from inside a human life.

People weren't kinder then. The people you knew well then, and the people you know well now, were and are about as kind as people are. The strangers you hear about have always been the worst of the strangers, because those are the ones you hear about, and the ones you heard about in nineteen ninety-six have had thirty years to fade.