“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.”
I think EVERYONE should read this… it is so easy for media to manipulate people into thinking that the world is somehow darker, weirder, or more dangerous than it was before… I think this article will help people think critically about what inflammatory news tells them
I think that if one thinks of social constructs as memes – I mean, not in the common-today-sense of a funny image, but in the original sense of memetics, as something composed of information and analogous to a biological organism that has to spread and have other features that biological organisms do to survive – then that’s not surprising.
If someone subscribes to a particular moral system, then I’d expect that a system that has people concerned about maintaining that moral system and shifts in society away from it will tend to outcompete one that doesn’t.