I have a long-running argument with my brother. He insists that his children, who are growing up in New York City right now, are a lot less safe than we were as kids in the same neighborhood. I happen to know this is absurd, and I’ve tried for many years to convince him. I’ve shown him news reports, crime statistics. Once I even downloaded an FBI report showing without a doubt that New York was much more dangerous 30 years ago. But he is unmoved. He remembers our childhood as gentler, safer. And I have to admit—there are moments when I walk around my old neighborhood and see visions of the mailman tipping his hat to my 10-year-old self, and the neighbors smiling as I made my way home to dinner.
Why do so many of us have this feeling that when we were younger, people were nicer and more moral, and took care of one another better? An experimental psychologist named Adam Mastroianni had also been wondering about this persistent conviction and did a systematic study of the phenomenon recently published in Nature.
Mastroianni documents that this hazy memory is shared by many different demographics, and felt quite strongly. He explains how the illusion works and why it has such a hold on us. And most important, he explains how it can distort not just our personal relationships but our culture and politics. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk with Mastroianni and staff writer Julie Beck about the illusion of moral decline, and why it persists so strongly.
Whenever politicians or aspiring politicians make the claim that, you know, “Things used to be better, put me in charge and I’ll make them better again”—that’s a very old thing that we’ve heard many times. And it resonates with us, perhaps because we are primed to believe it, even when it’s not true.
Listen to the conversation here:
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The following episode transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Hanna Rosin: So, Julie, you know—even though I get annoyed when other people say people used to be nicer, I kind of think I might feel that way too.
If I have a vision of my childhood and I’m walking down the street from the playground, I imagine all my neighbors saying, “Hi, little Hanna.” [Laughter.] And the mailman coming by, you know, and tipping his hat at me, and the old man walking his dog.
And, you know, I have no idea if this memory is accurate, but I definitely have that feeling that people were nicer.
Julie Beck: Did you grow up in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood? Or what was it?
Rosin: No; I actually grew up in Queens, New York. So it’s probably, certainly not true. [Laughter.]
This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. I invited my colleague Julie Beck on to talk about something that’s always really bothered me. It’s when people talk about how things are so much worse today than they were in the past.
And they say things like “Neighbors used to be nicer, and everyone used to smile at you and help you out.” And sometimes it’s just grandpa chatter and you can pretty much ignore it. And then other times it turns into this “back when men were men and women were women”–type thing, which is more annoying.
Beck: There’s a benign wish to, like, tip your hat to the mailman. And then there’s a “Oh, we need to bring back the social order of the 1950s.” And then you’re like, “Whoa, how did we end up here?”
Julie analyzes psychological research and social trends, and she’s also the host of another Atlantic podcast, How to Talk to People.
And she’s here to help me understand this very interesting research that just emerged about this strong conviction people have that everything has gotten worse.
Adam Mastroianni: So my whole life, I’ve heard people say things like, “You used to be able to keep your doors unlocked at night,” or “You can’t trust someone’s word anymore.”
And I always chafed at those kinds of statements. So part of it was wanting to prove everybody wrong. But part of it, too, was like, Well, if they’re right, this is a big problem. And that’s kind of where we got started.
Rosin: That is Adam Mastroianni. He recently published a paper in Nature called “The Illusion of Moral Decline.” Adam is a psychologist, and he’s the author of the science blog Experimental History. And he spent a decade systematically studying why we feel things were better in the past … and what it means.
Mastroianni: I think my first year of graduate school was when Trump got elected. And so obviously it was a moment of “Make America Great Again” being sort of the vibe of the day.
Seeing claims that “The past was good, the present is bad, put me in charge and I can bring the good past back” also just made me see how this is much more than, you know, uncles and brothers-in-law and people on the internet saying these things— that these claims resonate with people, and they help put people in the Oval Office.
Rosin: Yeah. I mean, I have to say, that’s my motivation for being interested in your research, because I have always had a kind of detached curiosity about why this line resonates so strongly.
Like, why is it that—and it’s not just American leaders, it’s leaders all over the world—they can just say, “Oh, things were better back then,” and it immediately clicks for people? Like, they don’t even have to explain it. You can just say, “You know, make America great again.” It’s like four words, and all the assumptions are immediately there for people.
Mastroianni: Yeah. When I give talks in an academic context about this paper, what I start with is the end of Trump’s inaugural speech, where he says, “You know, we’ll make America wealthy again and proud again and safe again and great again.” And I point out that the most important word in those sentences isn’t America or safe or proud or strong or great. It’s again.
Rosin: Yes!
Mastroianni: Just that word does a ton of work. Which is that: Wwell, if things used to be great but aren’t now, it means something changed. It implies that we can change it back. It evokes a sense of loss, but also a sense of possibility of restoring the loss.
Rosin: Yeah. And it is the word again., It’s like that one little word sort of resolves something emotionally for people. It’s hard to understand exactly how it works, but you say the word again, and everyone’s like, “Ah, you just filled a hole for me.” You know? What exactly do you mean when you say “moral decline,” and why, if it’s an illusion, does it feel so real?
Mastroianni: There are a few totally reasonable hypotheses about what people might think of when they talk about moral decline. It might be that everyone means, like, “I heard that the 1950s were a really good time. And so what I’m really telling you is things have declined since then.” Not that they got worse in the past 10 years; that they got worse, you know, 20 years ago or 50 years ago. And we’re just living in the bad times now.
In a later study, we asked people go back even further than that. “What about 20 years before that? What about 40 years before that?” And what they told us there is—“Before I arrived, nothing was happening. Things were good. Then I got born, and then things started to go downhill.”
And what’s especially interesting is: It doesn’t matter when you were born. 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.
Rosin: Wait, really? So literally, people think the decline began when they came on this earth?
Mastroianni: Yeah. So, I mean, we don’t ask, like, the day before or 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 then.
“What about the year in which you were born?” And people told us it was even better then. 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.
Rosin: That is so interesting. I don’t think I fully grasped that. So people are projecting whatever personal difficulties or struggles of life—now maybe I’m extrapolating—onto the whole of humanity, like they’re protecting their own life span onto a historical, broader cultural, political life span.
Mastroianni: Yeah. And I mean, this is a bias of people’s memory, because you don’t have memories from before you were born. You do have memories from most of the time after you were born.
So it would make sense—if this is a memory bias—that it turns on sometime near the moment of your birth. Obviously not exactly then, but this would explain why we don’t see this for what people think about before they were born and after.
Rosin: Does it really not matter how young you are? The stereotype is obviously, you know, Grandpa Simpson. It’s like, older people are always talking about how things were better back then, but not necessarily younger people.
Mastroianni: Yeah; we totally expected to find that as well, and we didn’t really. So when you ask people about the decline that they have perceived over their lifetimes, there’s no difference in the decline that younger and older people perceive.
Rosin: Julie, I was surprised to hear that there wasn’t a difference between older people and younger people in terms of how they perceive this moral decline. I mean, you’re not an old person; you’re young. So do you remember ever having this feeling?
Beck: I distinctly remember I did not get a smartphone until I moved to D.C. in 2013. So in the years before that, when I lived in Chicago, I have a memory of having so many more interactions with strangers on the street.
And I definitely do not have those nearly as frequently anymore. And I think it’s just because we’re all looking at our phones, right? So part of me kind of romanticizes the, you know, chance encounters of the pre-smartphone era and all of that.
Rosin: Yeah. And when I hear you say that, I’m like, Oh, it’s fine for Julie to have that feeling, and it’s fine for me to have that feeling. But if I multiply it by a few million times, then I get this political movement of “Let’s go back to the era when things were better,” and that I don’t really like so much.
Beck: Yeah. One thing that this makes me think of, too, is a line of research that has found that social trust has actually been declining in the U.S. for decades. So people are essentially less and less likely to say that generally most other people can be trusted.
And so you’re totally right that there are really big political implications for thinking the past was better and people used to be more trustworthy.
For me, it feels like kind of a chicken-or-an-egg question. Like, do we trust people less because we believe they’ve gotten morally worse? Or do we believe people are worse because we’re more disconnected from our communities?
Mastroianni: We focused here on a pretty narrow question, which is, “Has the way that people treat one another in their everyday lives changed over time?” And do people think that it has?
This is a model of when things are bad, it’s easy for them to seem like they have gotten worse. And so I don’t think this is the only domain where we might find this illusion, because people say this about a lot of different parts of life.
You know: that art is worse than it used to be. That culture is worse than it used to be. That the education system is worse than it used to be. But it seems pretty clear to me that we are predisposed to believe that it’s true, even when it’s not.
Rosin: Your assumptions in this research are—people have this idea that a certain kind of morality has declined. But in your mind, it has not declined. So to you, this is like an illusion. I mean, you call it an illusion. Right?
Mastroianni: Yes.
Rosin: Okay. So working within that assumption, what’s your explanation? Like, why would a majority of us be operating under a delusion/illusion? Like something that you’re saying is clearly not true.
Mastroianni: We think that there are two cognitive biases that can combine to produce this illusion. So this explanation has 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 if you got turned down for your high-school prom, it feels pretty bad at the time. Twenty 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.
Beck: So when I read the paper, Hanna, I wondered whether what might be going on is that people are, to some degree, picking up on a real change in the world.
There’s the decline of social trust—but also widespread loneliness and disconnection and the erosion of community life, in the sense of fewer people knowing their neighbors and declining membership in community organizations.
And all of those things definitely have an impact on people’s personal lives. But I think it manifests as a vague feeling like, Oh, it’s just harder to make friends or harder to feel like I’m a part of my community.
So I wonder if we’re feeling this sort of vague and troubling sense of disconnection and assigning it a false explanation: that things used to be better before, and people just suck more than they used to.
Rosin: Oh, that’s really interesting. So what you’re saying is the feeling is real. Like, the feeling that something has changed is real because something has changed. There is more disconnection and loneliness.
So instead we make up this very tidy story. Like, “When I was a kid, things were better and people were nicer and the mailman tipped his hat”—and we just kind of stopped there.
Beck: Yeah; there definitely are real things that are really happening that would make people feel disconnected from strangers around them. And I wonder if, yeah, we just have a hard time psychologically, knowing why that’s the case.
Rosin: So Adam, I want to run a couple of theories by you. One is the possibility that something has actually changed. And we’re just calling it by the wrong name. That, like, something has declined. And this is from a different body of psychological research about social trust.
That there is a change in our isolation, our sense of connectedness, our face-to-ace contact. Like there are some societal changes which are real and structural and have kind of left a hole in us that we are misnaming morality.
When we read it here, we thought there are some things that are changing and that do leave us a little despairing—and maybe we’re just calling them by the wrong name.
Mastroianni: Yeah.
Rosin: Like we have this incredibly powerful feeling that something is wrong, and that “something” is connectedness or community or something like that.
Mastroianni: Yeah. So it’s very easy to slip from “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 Eibach 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, you know, protect this fragile life—and so you are much more attuned to the dangers of the world. That’s why you think there’s more of them.
Rosin: You know, Julie, I have this conversation with my brother all the time, and he’s always telling me his kids aren’t safe. He lives in New York. He’s like, “My kids aren’t safe. They can’t go outside. They can’t go down the block.” Like, he really freaks out, you know? And: “It’s way less safe than it was when we were kids.” And I’m like, “Dude, we grew up in New York in the ’70s, right?” It was really not safe.
Beck: Like, statistically.
Rosin: Statistically. And I’ve shown him news articles, and I once pulled out an FBI report. I specially downloaded an FBI report that showed, you know, crime statistics in New York from when we were kids.
And his conviction is so strong about this. I can’t budge him. I can’t show him enough numbers or statistics to make him think, Oh, things aren’t worse now.
I mean, Adam Mastroianni actually has a term for this. This is a little mean to my brother, but his term is unearned conviction. And I think what he means by that is exactly this. It’s like: Your conviction is incredibly strong, even though you have really no basis to back up the story that you’re attaching to that very strong conviction.
Beck: Yeah. I mean it seems like, regardless of the FBI report, the story your brother is telling himself is super-emotionally resonant.
Rosin: Yes.
Beck: And the stories that we tell ourselves about our own lives really do sort of shape who we are. It’s really interesting, because when we tell these stories to ourselves about 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 suffered through these trials and come out stronger for it, and things are looking up.” Whereas a contamination story is like: “These trials have conquered me, and I am now 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 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.
Rosin: 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 in a lot of moments in history, and now is one of them, these contamination stories—like “America was great once” or “Russia was great once”—have a particular kind of emotional juice and can really rally people.
Beck: 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 the safety of your kid. And so, of course, that’s going to have like a way stronger impact.
Rosin: Now Adam, did you find any appreciable differences between demographics? So if not between old and young people, what about gender differences, or people with different political ideologies?
Mastroianni: We didn’t find any gender differences. We didn’t find any differences by racial groups. We didn’t find any education differences. The only other demographic difference that we found was an ideological one, a political one. The people who self-identified as more conservative perceived more decline over time than the people who self-identified as liberal.
But even for the people who were the most liberal, they still said that people are less kind today than they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or whatever point in the past. So this is something that conservatives said louder, but liberals said as well.
Rosin: So someone who identifies as a liberal could believe that there’s less racism and sexism—but still believe that those other general universal markers of morality have declined.
Mastroianni: Yes. And in fact, it seems like they do. In our studies, the much smaller group of people who say that people are better now than they used to be—when we asked them “Why? What were you thinking of?,” one thing that does come up for them is there’s more tolerance. There’s less racism, sexism, ableism; all the isms.
So it seems like that’s not what people are spontaneously thinking of when they say that people are less kind than they used to be. Because if you ask them directly, “Do you think that, for instance, people treat African Americans with more respect and courtesy or less than in the past?,” a majority of people will say more today than in the past.
But if you ask them, “Are people more or less kind today?,” they’ll go less kind. So this is not what they’re thinking of when they answer the question.
Rosin: Yeah. So it’s a really, really specific feeling. I definitely think that people treat each other with more respect, largely because we have broadened the window of who is allowed to be respected, and sort of patriarchal notions of control over people’s bodies and who gets to make decisions. I mean, there’s so many ways in which we have opened the door to fairness and equity. I’d much rather be alive today than 50 years ago, for sure.
Mastroianni: Yeah, I agree. And so I think it was especially surprising that I’m sure there are many other people who agree. But even some of the people who do agree—they seem to think like, Yeah, but that actually doesn’t come from people’s heart of hearts. That they’re actually still worse to one another now than they used to be.
Yeah; they’ll say all the right things or they’ll have the right opinions. But you know, they won’t hold the door open for you, or they’ll cheat you when they can. Now people know the right things to say, but they still do more of the bad things.
Rosin: Do we feel the same way with people we know? Does it play out differently in our personal lives?
Mastroianni: You can actually also produce an illusion of improvement. You actually primarily hear good things and experience good things about people that you know. And so we thought that in your personal world, this illusion of decline might be turned down or turned off or even reversed.
And people told us: “People in general? Worse today than they were 15 years ago. People that I have known for the last 15 years? Better today than they were 15 years ago.”
Rosin: So Julie, one thing that Adam found that I thought was so interesting was that people we know—like our own people, people we’re close to or whatever—they’re somehow getting better over time, and yet the general public are getting worse. I don’t quite understand how those fit together.
Beck: So I guess we just think the moral decline is happening with strangers, with all those other people.
Rosin: Right.
Beck: And it seems like potentially the disconnection from community that many people are experiencing could just mean that we’re slotting more people into the “morally compromised, untrustworthy” category.
Rosin: Right. Like, if we met more people and we had more casual acquaintances and we went to our bowling leagues or whatever, then we might include more people in that circle of people we know. And those people are good people. So that could sort of spiral upward rather than what’s happening, which is a momentum downward.
Beck: Adam’s study kind of seems to say that if you get to know people, then you won’t think they’re on a downward slope of moral depravity anymore.
Rosin: For one thing, Adam, it sounds to me like the problem is that people are absolutely certain. Like they’re not questioning. Was the past a worse place? It’s a sort of lack of humility. Because if you try to understand, “Well, maybe what did get worse?,” then you would come up with more specific and useful policy solutions.
I mean, I assume one reason you did this research is to point out a mistake. Like, we’re all living under this delusion. And in your head—since you sound like a fairly optimistic person—is it “knowledge is power,” and people will know, and then they will stop? What’s the aim, or what’s your wish here?
Mastroianni: Yeah. I mean, as a psychologist I a little bit despair of changing people’s minds, because I know how difficult it is. It doesn’t work the way that we think that it works, like, “Oh, you have the wrong model of the world. How about I give you the correct facts, and now you have the correct model of the world?” When does that ever happen? When has that ever happened to me? Like, never.
And one effect that I certainly hope that this has is: Whenever politicians or aspiring politicians make the claim that, you know, “Things used to be better, and put me in charge and I’ll make them better again”—that’s a very old thing that we’ve heard many times. And it resonates with us, perhaps because we are primed to believe it, even when it’s not true.
Beck: So, Hanna, now that we know this is an illusion, right, that’s very interesting. But will it actually change how you feel?
Rosin: I don’t really know. I mean, I feel like as a journalist, it depresses me a little bit because I spent a lot of time researching and marshaling facts, like I did with my brother. And to think that emotions ultimately squash all of that—I don’t really know what to do with that.
Beck: Yeah.
Rosin: But in my own personal life, awareness is helpful. I don’t think any bad can come from understanding your own emotional levers better. It’s not that it immediately leads to a change, but I don’t think it can ever be bad to understand, Oh, I’m having this emotional attachment or strong belief, and that’s leading me to behave in this way. That in and of itself is a small daily miracle. So that’s good enough.
Rosin: Listeners, if you enjoyed this conversation with Adam Mastroianni and Julie Beck, and if you generally like learning about these psychological levers that are guiding our choices, Julie hosts a full season of conversations much like this one, on the Atlantic podcast How to Talk to People. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
This episode was produced by Becca Rashid. Edited by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-checked by Isabel Cristo. Engineering by Rob Smierciak. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid. The managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez. You can find new episodes of Radio Atlantic every Thursday.