Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining1,2. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources3, the underuse of social support4 and social influence5.
Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility
As individuals and political leaders increasingly interact in online social networks, it is important to understand the dynamics of emotion perception online. Here, we propose that social media users overperceive levels of moral outrage felt by individuals and groups, inflating beliefs about intergroup hostility. Using a Twitter field survey, we measured authors’ moral outrage in real time and compared authors’ reports to observers’ judgements of the authors’ moral outrage. We find that observers systematically overperceive moral outrage in authors, inferring more intense moral outrage experiences from messages than the authors of those messages actually reported. This effect was stronger in participants who spent more time on social media to learn about politics. Preregistered confirmatory behavioural experiments found that overperception of individuals’ moral outrage causes overperception of collective moral outrage and inflates beliefs about hostile communication norms, group affective polarization and ideological extremity. Together, these results highlight how individual-level overperceptions of online moral outrage produce collective overperceptions that have the potential to warp our social knowledge of moral and political attitudes.
A large-scale investigation of everyday moral dilemmas
Abstract. Questions of right and wrong are central to daily life, yet scientific understanding of everyday moral dilemmas is limited. We conducted a data-d
Assessing Moral Judgment by Large Language Models – A Survey of Available Datasets
Recent advances in language modeling have contributed to a growing emphasis on machine ethics, including researching and assessing moral judgments made by large language models (LLMs). This paper provides a critical survey of the existing datasets for exactly this assessment, with a special focus on the respective data sources. We address the current lack of theoretical grounding by providing an introduction to ethics and different frameworks from moral philosophy and moral psychology. Moreover, we identify four main data sources: webcrawled corpora, scholars, laypeople, and synthetic data generation. By discussing the strengths and weaknesses of these sources, we analyze their implications for the assessment of moral judgment. Importantly, systemizing the available datasets reveals an over-reliance on previous work, reinforcing existing shortcomings. Addressing the current limitations, we recommend adopting a consistent terminology and creating independently curated datasets based on interdisciplinary work. To ensure a clear delineation of normative approaches, we propose focusing on the assessment of moral consistency and certainty of LLMs as effective and well-defined indicators of their performance on moral judgment.
Facts and Myths about Misperceptions
Misperceptions threaten to warp mass opinion and public policy on controversial issues in politics, science, and health. What explains the prevalence and persistence of these false and unsupported beliefs, which seem to be genuinely held by many people? Though limits on cognitive resources and attention play an important role, many of the most destructive misperceptions arise in domains where individuals have weak incentives to hold accurate beliefs and strong directional motivations to endorse beliefs that are consistent with a group identity such as partisanship. These tendencies are often exploited by elites who frequently create and amplify misperceptions to influence elections and public policy. Though evidence is lacking for claims of a “post-truth” era, changes in the speed with which false information travels and the extent to which it can find receptive audiences require new approaches to counter misinformation. Reducing the propagation and influence of false claims will require further efforts to inoculate people in advance of exposure (for example, media literacy), debunk false claims that are already salient or widespread (for example, fact-checking), reduce the prevalence of low-quality information (for example, changing social media algorithms), and discourage elites from promoting false information (for example, strengthening reputational sanctions).
Information Disclosure, Cognitive Biases, and Payday Borrowing
ABSTRACT Can psychology‐guided information disclosure induce borrowers to lower their use of high‐cost debt? In a field experiment at payday stores, we find that information that makes people think less narrowly (over time) about finance costs results in less borrowing. In particular, reinforcing the adding‐up dollar fees incurred when rolling over loans reduces the take‐up of future payday loans by 11% in the subsequent 4 months. Although we remain agnostic as to the overall sufficiency of better disclosure policy to “remedy” payday borrowing, we cast the 11% reduction in borrowing in light of the relative low cost of this policy.
Metacognitive Myopia: A Major Obstacle on the Way to Rationality
The notion of metacognitive myopia refers to a conspicuous weakness of the quality control of memory and reasoning processes. Although people are often remarkably sensitive even to complex samples of information when making evaluative judgments and decisions, their uncritical and naive tendency to take the validity of sampled information for granted constitutes a major obstacle to rational behavior. After illustrating this phenomenon with reference to prominent biases (base-rate neglect, misattribution, perseverance), we decompose metacognitive myopia into two distinct but intertwined functions, monitoring and control. We offer explanations for why effectively monitoring the biases resulting from information sampling in an uncertain world is so difficult and why the control function is severely restricted by the lack of volitional control over mental actions. Because of these and other difficulties, metacognitive myopia constitutes a major obstacle to rational judgment and decision making.
In 25-Country Survey, Americans Especially Likely To View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad
Across 25 countries, Americans are the most likely to see the morality and ethics of people in their country as somewhat or very bad.
Estimating the effect size of moral contagion in online networks: A pre-registered replication and meta-analysis
Abstract. Over 5 billion people now use social media platforms. As our social lives become increasingly entangled with online social networks, it is import
The Golden Age Is Behind Us: How the Status Quo Impacts the Evaluation of Technology
New technology invariably provokes concerns over potential societal impacts. Even as risks often fail to materialize, the fear continues. The current research explored the psychological underpinnings of this pattern. Across four studies ( N = 2,454 adults recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk), we found evidence for the role of status quo thinking in evaluating technology. In Study 1, we experimentally manipulated the reported age of unfamiliar technology and found that people evaluate it more favorably when it is described as originating before (vs. after) their birth. In Studies 2 through 4, participants’ age at the time of invention strongly predicts attitudes toward a wide range of real-world technologies. Finally, we found that individual differences in status-quo-based decision-making moderated evaluations of technology. These studies provide insight into how people respond to the rapidly changing technological landscape.
Explicit warnings reduce but do not eliminate the continued influence of misinformation
Information that initially is presumed to be correct, but that is later retracted or corrected, often continues to influence memory and reasoning. This occurs even if the retraction itself is well remembered. The present study investigated whether the continued influence of misinformation can be reduced by explicitly warning people at the outset that they may be misled. A specific warning— giving detailed information about the continued influence effect (CIE)—succeeded in reducing the continued reliance on outdated information but did not eliminate it. A more general warning—reminding people that facts are not always properly checked before information is disseminated—was even less effective. In an additional experiment, a specific warning was combined with the provision of a plausible alternative explanation for the retracted information. This combined manipulation further reduced the CIE but still failed to eliminate it altogether.
The Elusive Backfire Effect: Mass Attitudes’ Steadfast Factual Adherence
Can citizens heed factual information, even when such information challenges their partisan and ideological attachments? The “backfire effect,” described by Nyhan and Reifler (Polit Behav 32(2):303–330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2, 2010), says no: rather than simply ignoring factual information, presenting respondents with facts can compound their ignorance. In their study, conservatives presented with factual information about the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq became more convinced that such weapons had been found. The present paper presents results from five experiments in which we enrolled more than 10,100 subjects and tested 52 issues of potential backfire. Across all experiments, we found no corrections capable of triggering backfire, despite testing precisely the kinds of polarized issues where backfire should be expected. Evidence of factual backfire is far more tenuous than prior research suggests. By and large, citizens heed factual information, even when such information challenges their ideological commitments.
Moral Incentives in Credit Card Debt Repayment: Evidence from a Field Experiment
We study the role of morality in debt repayment, using an experiment with the credit card customers of a large Islamic bank in Indonesia. In our main treatment, clients receive a text message stating that “non-repayment of debts by someone who is able to repay is an injustice.” This moral appeal decreases delinquency by 4.4 percentage points from a baseline of 66 percent and reduces default among customers with the highest ex ante credit risk. Additional treatments help benchmark the effects against direct financial incentives and rule out competing explanations, such as reminder effects, priming religion, and provision of new information.
The Hedonics of Debt
Psychologists and economists often discuss the “pain” of paying for our purchases. Four experiments examine how people evaluate prospective debt payments, analyzing how different features of a loan (down payment, final payment, duration, monthly payments) affect willingness to accept the loan. Akin to previous findings on physical pain, participants exhibited duration neglect and over-weighted final moments. However, participants also focused heavily on the monthly or average payment (unlike in retrospective studies of physical pain where only peak-end moments seem to count). In Experiment 2, participants’ willingness to accept the loan was not significantly diminished by making it more expensive through keeping the same monthly payment but extending the length of the loan by 40 percent (evincing duration neglect). Further, in Experiments 3 and 4, we show that participants increased their willingness to buy if loans were made longer and more expensive by adding smaller, less “painful” payments to the end.
Misperceptions About Others
Perceptions about others play an important role in shaping people's attitudes and behaviors, as well as social norms more broadly. This review presents a meta-analysis of the recent empirical literature that examines perceptions about others in the field, covering over a million observations for a total of 434 elicited perceptions. We document a number of stylized facts. Misperceptions about others are widespread, asymmetric, much larger when about out-group members, and positively associated with one's own attitudes. Experimental treatments to recalibrate misperceptions generally work as intended; they sometimes lead to meaningful changes in behaviors, though this often occurs only immediately after the treatments. We discuss different conceptual frameworks that could explain the origin, persistence, and rigidity of misperceptions about others. We point to several directions for future research.
Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives.
Discover this 1986 paper in Psychological Review by Kahneman, Daniel; and, Miller, Dale T. focusing on: Attribution; Emotional Responses; Social Norms; Judgment; Models Abstract: Presents a theory of norms and normality and applies the theory to phenomena of emotional responses, social judgment, and conversations about causes. Norms are assumed to be constructed ad hoc by recruiting specific representations. Category norms are derived by recruiting exemplars. Specific objects or events generate their own norms by retrieval of similar experiences stored in memory or by construction of counterfactual alternatives. The normality of a stimulus is evaluated by comparing it with the norms that it evokes after the fact, rather than to precomputed expectations. Norm theory is applied in analyses of the enhanced emotional response to events that have abnormal causes, of the generation of predictions and inferences from observations of behavior, and of the role of norms in causal questions and answers. (3 p ref) (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
