(highlight:: The lllusion of Societal/Moral Decline After People Are Born
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So the people who were 30 told us it happened 30 years ago, the people who were 60 told us it happened 60 years ago. Wait, really?
Speaker 2
So literally people think the decline began when they came on this earth. Yeah.
Speaker 1
So, I mean, we don't ask like, you know, the day before and the day after. But the question that we asked was rate how kind, honest, nice and good people are today. What about the year in which you were 20 and people told us it was better than? What about the year in which you were born and people told us it was even better than? And then we asked what about 20 years before that and 40 years before that? And there's no difference in people's answers. That line is flat. It's only when we asked about 20 years after your birth that the line goes down.
Speaker 2
That is so interesting. I don't think I fully grasp that. So people are projecting whatever personal difficulties or struggles of life. Now maybe I'm extrapolating onto the whole of humanity.)
- Time 0:04:40
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(highlight:: The Illusion of a Declining Society: Biased Exposure and Biased Memory
Transcript:
Speaker 2
So working within that assumption, what's your explanation? Like, why would a majority of us be operating under a delusion slash illusion, like something that you're saying is clearly not true?
Speaker 1
We think that there are two cognitive biases that can combine to produce this illusion. So this explanation is two parts. The first is what we call biased exposure, which is that people tend to attend to predominantly negative information, especially about people that they don't know. So this is both a combination of the information that they receive about people that they don't know, which is primarily negative and the information that they pay attention to. So this is why when you look out at the world beyond your personal world, it looks like it's full of people who are doing bad things. They're lying and cheating and stealing and killing. The second part of the explanation is what we call biased memory. Memory researchers have noticed that the badness of bad memories tends to fade faster than the goodness of good memories. So, you know, if you got turned down for your high school prom, feels pretty bad at the time. Many years later, it's maybe a funny story. If you have a great high school prom, it feels pretty good at the time. And 20 years later, it's still a pretty nice memory. It doesn't feel as nice as it did to experience it, but it still feels pretty nice. And that turns out to be on average what happens to people's memories, that the bad ones inch toward neutral faster than the good ones do. And the bad ones are more likely to both be forgotten and to become good in retrospect.)
- Time 0:09:20
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(highlight:: People's perception of the world is heavily influenced by the change in their worldview over time
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So it's very easy to slip from, you know, people are less kind than they used to be to things are worse than they used to be. And so it is true that trust in institutions has declined over time. A lot of people also say that interpersonal trust has declined over time, and I actually think that case is much more overstated than the decline in institutional trust. There's some work by a guy named Richard Ibach on how people think the world has gotten more dangerous. And he finds that people believe this, and the people who believe this especially are parents. And when you ask those parents, when did the world become more dangerous, you get a date that is curiously close to the date of the birth of their first child. The obvious implication being that nothing about the world changed, it was your worldview that changed, and now you have to protect this fragile life and so you are much more attuned To the dangers of the world.
Speaker 2
That's why you think there's more of them.)
- Time 0:13:44
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(highlight:: Two categories for the stories we tell ourselves: Redemptive and Contamination Stories
Transcript:
Speaker 3
It's really interesting because when we tell these stories to ourselves about, you know, our personal lives, a lot of times those stories fall into one of two categories. One being redemptive and the other being contamination. And so a redemptive story is like I have, you know, suffered through these trials and come out stronger for it and things are looking up. Whereas the contamination story is like these trials have conquered me and I am now like broken and fundamentally a worse person. And it probably won't surprise you to hear that contamination sequences are not great for people's mental health. That research was done, you know, with stories that we're telling about our personal lives, but it feels like we're kind of telling a contamination story about all of humanity.
Speaker 2
I guess what's depressing to me is why are those the ones that stick? I mean, there are redemption stories that are popular in American society, but I feel like a lot of moments in history and now is one of them. These contamination stories, like America was great ones or Russia was great ones, have a particular kind of emotional juice and can really rally people.
Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, maybe it's kind of like your brother's fear in New York, right? Where it's just like, that is so viscerally emotional. It's like the safety of your kid. And so of course that's going to have like a way stronger impact.)
- Time 0:16:11
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