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The illusion of moral decline | Nature

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We show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced, and suggest that this illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources, the underuse of social support and social influence.

Download PDF Subjects Human behaviour Psychology Abstract Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining 1 , 2 . In a series of studies using both archival and original data ( n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries h

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