Are we wired to see it that way?
Universal truth may be found in unlikely places.
Adam Mastroianni’s surveys may explain our persistent gloominess (New York Times):
Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moral decline. First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our conversations.
Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.
When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline. Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.
Related are glass-half-empty progressives unacquainted with Hanlon’s razor who find a dark cloud in every Democratic silver lining. They routinely behave like jilted lovers. Because they expect more of Democrats, Dems retain the capacity to disappoint them. Republicans they wrote off long ago. But Mastroianni’s surveys suggest I could be wrong.
That explanation fits well with two more of our surprising findings. First, people exempt their own social circles from decline; in fact, they think the people they know are nicer than ever. This might be because people primarily encounter positive information about people they know, which our model predicts can create an illusion of improvement.
Second, people believe that moral decline began only after they arrived on Earth; they see humanity as stably virtuous in the decades before their birth. This especially suggests that biased memory plays a role in producing the illusion.
Or maybe Mastroianni doesn’t hang out where I do.