The Morality Myth

Reform just gained 677 seats in local UK elections. Trump is rapidly shrinking the US government. Whether those things excite or alarm you, one truth is hard to deny: People want, or are getting, change.

“The process of our moral decline began with the sinking of the foundations of morality… bringing us finally to the dark dawning of our modern day, in which we can neither bear our immoralities nor face the remedies needed to cure them.”

Which Guardian columnist do you reckon wrote this? Maybe it’s a Telegraph pundit?

It’s neither. It’s a quote from Titus Livy… and it’s 2,000 years old.

The Data Doesn’t Support the Doom

That quote opens a 2023 Harvard paper (Mastroianni & Gilbert) exploring perceptions of moral decline over time.

They surveyed over 220,000 Americans from 1949 to 2019 on traits like honesty, kindness and helpfulness. Across 84% of questions, most believed morality had declined.

The trend held globally: in 59 countries, 350,000 people between 1996 and 2007 reported the same feeling, that morality is getting worse and is now a “moderately big problem.”

Interestingly, that sense of moral decline was completely unrelated to actual time. The year of the survey explained less than 0.3% of the variation in responses.

Suffice to say that we’ve always thought morality was falling apart. We believe our time is uniquely broken.

This creeping sense of moral decay is nothing new. It speaks to chronocentrism, the idea that right now is the most important time in history. We tend to believe our time is uniquely broken. But that belief doesn’t reflect reality, it reflects human bias.

How Negative Worldviews Hurt Human Performance

This isn’t just philosophical. Our perception of the world affects how we show up: at work, in relationships, in society.

Psychologist Jer Clifton produced seminal work in this area. He calls our beliefs about the character of the world our “primals.” The introductory 2018 paper is fascinating and worth a read in itself. Clifton’s subsequent research, in summary, found that people with “negative primals,” – like “seeing the world as a dangerous place” – experienced “less success, less job and life satisfaction, worse health, dramatically less flourishing, more negative emotion and more depression” across 48 separate professions.

Essentially, when we think the world’s gone to shit, we’re more risk averse and take less action on goal-oriented behaviour.  It’s an extension of Maier and Seligman’s 1976 notion of “learned helplessness”; when we feel powerless to influence outcomes, we’re more likely to give up. 

It links back to our Q-Factor piece: if things didn’t work before, we tell ourselves they won’t again. But every effort is a new lottery ticket. Over time, the odds improve.

This isn’t toxic positivity. It’s a recognition that when we believe the world is broken, it’s harder for us to do our best work in it.

Why Our Brains Keep Falling for the Trap

We’re wired to react to short-term threats, not long-term trends. Confirmation bias reinforces this: we spot what we already believe.

Malcolm Gladwell explored this via the Broken Windows Theory in his breakout book Tipping Point: visible disorder (like vandalism) increases crime because it suggests nobody’s watching. Similarly, when we feel like the world is collapsing, we internalise that, and we don’t try as hard as we ought to.

The Birmingham bin strikes are a modern case. Refuse piling up wasn’t just a sanitation issue; it was/is a mental trigger. A council report noted the “psychological impact of the exposure to waste.”

Perceptions affect how we behave. We cherry-pick headlines and stories to confirm our beliefs. There’s something called “motivated perception,” coined in a 1954 Princeton study, where football fans were shown footage of the same brawl on the pitch. Each side thought the other team started it.

It’s not just bias. It’s built-in. Being aware of that doesn’t fix everything, but it gives you agency to question your assumptions. Is your perspective helping you? Or holding you back?

What If the World’s Not Getting Worse?

Obviously, it’s a difficult question to answer. You may be familiar with the Prisoner’s Dilemma – if not, it’s a good one to play with your mates – and while the guts are unimportant, it’s a decent measurement of cooperation. 60,000 participants from 1956 to 2017 found that cooperation rates increased by over 21%. Not massive, but not decaying either.

Steven Pinker's done a fantastic job of highlighting topline figures of improving literacy and life-expectancy rates, as well as the rapid reduction of extreme poverty across the world.

That said, we're not trying to piss on you and tell you it’s raining here. We aren’t living in a utopia. But if we believe the world’s doomed, we scale back our agency. We check out. But we don’t need to save global politics. We can influence our own mentality, that of our household, or the pals in our group chats.

Blaming the system or people these days is comforting. It absolves us of responsibility.  As Luvvie Ajayi puts it, “Be the domino.” Move first. Shift the tone in the room you’re in. That’s something meaningful. 

Choosing Your Hard

Yes, we’ve written before on how optimism fuels performance. This isn’t semantics. The gap between scepticism and pessimism is your capacity to act.

When you feel the pull to write off society as doomed, remember: Livy felt the same way 2,000 years ago. So did your grandparents. And so do you.

We’ve always thought things were getting worse. But we’re still here.

Clifton, referenced earlier, sums this whole thing up:

“Human action may not express who we are so much as where we think we are and much of what we become in life—much joy and suffering—may depend on the sort of world we think this is.”

The world you see is the one you live in. Choose wisely.