Mellman: Are we really suffering moral decline in this country?

This week, in discussing a fascinating new paper, I want to bring together two ideas that have long animated this column.    

One of those ideas is that people have limited insight into their own thinking, including assessing changes in their views. For instance, last week I described Americans’ inaccurate belief that they had become more socially conservative, when in fact on most such issues they’d become more liberal.    

The second set of findings, which I’ve labeled “I’m OK, but you’re not,” reflects the tendency for people to think things are all right close to them, but pretty awful elsewhere.   

My health care is good, but others suffer lousy coverage. Schools in my neighborhood are good, but heaven help students in the rest of the state and country. Crime is under control where I live, but out of control nationwide.   

Now comes a study by psychologists Adam Mastroianni of Columbia and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University on public evaluations of moral decline. The researchers document the sense of deteriorating morals going back thousands of years, continuing to the present.   

They located 177 survey questions that sampled more than 200,000 Americans between 1949 and 2019, asking some version of how they thought the nation’s morality had changed over time.   

For example: “Right now, do you think the state of moral values in this country as a whole is getting better or getting worse?”  

All told, 84 percent of the time majorities reported that America’s morality had deteriorated. (This pattern is international.)   

Of course, if morals had been steadily declining, even for the last 70 years, let alone the last 2,000, we’d all be living in some Mad Maxian dystopia.   

Are we really suffering continuous moral decline?   

Harvard’s Steven Pinker scoured the historical record and found, “we’re getting nicer every day.” Morality is actually increasing.  

Survey research also calls the reality of moral decline into serious question. Mastroianni and Gilbert analyzed more than 100 survey questions asking people to report on some element of current morality that pollsters asked at least twice between 1965 and 2020.  

In short, assessments of morality were stable. People said morality had declined, but when asked about the level of that morality at different points in time, their responses showed no change.   

The perception of moral decline is an “illusion,” conclude Mastroianni and Gilbert.   

This in part reflects the “I’m OK, you’re not” phenomenon. My personal experience, my local world is pretty moral, people assert, but the rest of the world isn’t and it’s getting worse.  

Similarly, this study provides additional evidence of people’s limited insight into what’s changing in and around them. They claim to see declining morality, but in fact they don’t.   

There is political relevance to this illusion.   

In offering to make America great again, Trump promised a return to an America that may never have been, but one he and his supporters believed once was. It reflected a sense that changes in the country were deleterious and needed to be rolled back.  

A clear sign of public antipathy to the cultural transformations wrought in this country came in response to a question we posed to voters just before the 2016 election asking them to evaluate the changes in “American culture and way of life” since the 1950s.  

Recall, as some of our respondents may not have, that the 1950s was before the civil rights era, before digital technology, before Medicare and even before the advent of nationally broadcast color television.   

Yet just 38 percent thought the changes since the 1950s have been for the better, while 55 percent said our culture and way of life mostly changed for the worse.   

Eight percent — apparently still enjoying their hula hoops, listening to monaural record players and sipping from racially segregated water fountains — were somehow unable to discern much change at all.  

Among those who believed America’s culture changed for the better, 74 percent supported Hillary Clinton, while among the 55 percent convinced it had gotten worse, two-thirds voted for Trump.   

Illusory perceptions can create political reality.   

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has helped elect 30 U.S. senators, 12 governors and dozens of House members. Mellman served as pollster to Senate Democratic leaders for over 20 years, as president of the American Association of Political Consultants, a member of the Association’s Hall of Fame, and is president of Democratic Majority for Israel.