Summary: Every generation believes it is living through a moral decline, yet the evidence tells a different story. While people often perceive society as growing more selfish or rude, they see kindness and integrity in those closest to them. In reality, cooperation, generosity, and moral progress have grown over time. Our tendency to focus on the negative simply makes it harder to recognize how far we’ve come.
Every generation thinks it’s witnessing humanity’s moral collapse. New York Times columnist David Brooks claims that “we inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration.” But are these timeless claims now true? This time, are we really living in the most immoral era?
Moral panic and pessimism appear to be largely illusory. In a study conducted by psychologists Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University, they found that every generation perceives moral decline. By consolidating survey data covering 235 questions about morality over a 70-year period, and with more than 12 million participants, Mastroianni and Gilbert found that people collectively believed that their generation and successive generations are morally declining compared to previous ones.
But here’s the paradox: When people rated those close to them (neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family), the perception of moral decline disappeared. In some cases, they viewed people they knew as more moral than the population at large. Thus, people hold inconsistent beliefs: Everyone is becoming more selfish, rude, and dishonest—except the people they know best.
Mastroianni and Gilbert attribute this mistaken perception of moral decline to two psychological biases working in tandem. First, we overvalue, seek out, and focus on negative information. When we witness immoral behavior, this information becomes especially memorable, skewing our beliefs about human morality.
Second, we view the past through rose-colored glasses, remembering earlier times as better across many measures. Because of this bias, we naturally assume that people in previous generations were more moral and virtuous than they actually were.
“Moral behavior” is difficult to quantify, never mind track over time. As argued by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, the modern world has experienced a severe decrease in homicide, slavery, and torture. Such historic moral improvement, Pinker argues, can be attributed to the advent of liberal society and the acceptance of Enlightenment values.
But the evidence for moral progress extends beyond these dramatic historical shifts. Social trust appears to be increasing as well. In a meta-analysis of social dilemma surveys from 1956–2017, psychologist Mingliang Yuan of Anhui Agricultural University and fellow researchers found that, in America, the “level of cooperation among strangers has increased” over the 61-year period. Moreover, they found that increases in urbanization and societal wealth correlated with greater social trust and cooperation.
This growing cooperation between strangers may help explain the increase in our charitable giving to people we’ll never meet. With the rise of the Information Age and global connectivity, we now have instant access to news about poverty and suffering worldwide, and we respond with unprecedented generosity.
According to Giving USA, in partnership with the University of Indiana School of Philanthropy, American charitable giving increased 3.3 percent (when adjusted for inflation) to $592.50 billion in the past year. The largest increase was in “international affairs” philanthropies, many of which aim to improve the well-being of the global poor.
The growth in charitable donations over the last decade has even inspired more evidence-based charities. One of these, GiveWell, publishes comprehensive research on the cost-effectiveness of the global health and development charities they fund. GiveWell even goes so far as to publish their mistakes, should a program or charitable organization prove to be less effective than expected, or if GiveWell’s research methods prove to be defective. They’re not only trying to maximize moral impact, but doing so with unusual transparency and self-correction.
Contrary to this evidence of generosity and the historic trends of moral progress, many still believe that the virtue of humanity is decaying. Some recent data seem to support their pessimism: The Understanding America Survey from the University of Southern California found in 2025 that conscientiousness (a tenet of the Big Five personality traits) is in decline. John Burn-Murdoch, at the Financial Times, speculates that this survey data on the decline of conscientiousness can be partially explained by technology enabling our ability to ghost and abandon social commitments.
But we should interpret these findings carefully. The survey data on conscientiousness is self-reported: how people perceive their own conscientiousness. In a new global culture focused on self-optimization that rewards dieting, perfectionism, and prestige in higher education, it’s perhaps no surprise that we see ourselves as less dependable, less industrious, and not nearly as conscientious as our grandparents.
Even if we fall prey to thinking of our generation as less moral than our predecessors, we need not let this pessimism make us pessimistic. In Mastroianni’s paper, “Things Could Be Better,” he conducted seven studies asking participants to imagine various events, institutions, and objects to be different. In every experiment survey participants routinely thought of how it “could be better” and not how things “could be worse.” Thus, they were less likely to appreciate the ways humanity has progressed. Mastroianni noted in an interview, “When it comes to moral progress, we may be less grateful that we won’t get stabbed by a spear when we walk down the street, instead we feel like there’s moral decay when someone gives us a weird look on the bus.”
We tend to overlook our moral progress and focus on how things could be better, which keeps us imagining a more virtuous world. Yet historical evidence shows we’re living in a time of unprecedented moral advancement; people are more cooperative, generous, and concerned for others than in any previous generation. We want to improve, and we want moral progress so much that at times we miss the forest for the trees.
