THE ILLUSION OF MORAL DECLINE by Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert (Nature, 2023).
"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."
@Barros_heritage@pvonhellermannn@academicchatter I would add ‘no baseline.’ How many people have ever looked up the graph of, oh illegitimate births or divorce rates or adultery rates or addiction over the last 75 years?
There’s always someone’s butt, or Monroe’s skirt or the Beatles’ haircuts to shock the readily shocked.
@TheConversationUS@psychology
Unpopular opinion: Instagram is successful among teens because it gives them exactly what they want and what they think they need to compete. So the fault doesn't lie solely with Meta, although they're making money of unhealty behaviour. But it's first and foremost a cultural problem.
Agreed. Sometimes I think a car/driving analogy works well. We have roads, driving rules, licensing, etc. (i.e., driving structure) so that all of us can get where we are going faster and safer. No driving structure at all would make it really tough for us to get around, even in the best car (think Mad Max).
To be clear on my own suggestion, I think the baseline of structure has to do as much with motivation-initiative, regulating challenge, and assignment navigation as with behaviour and discipline.
Also, Csikszentmihalyi's ideas on "flow" have much to say on all this. He really gets a lot of things right, e.g., his views on the need for a challenge-skills match fit well with mainstream ideas re learners as self-regulators.
@dsmith@jeffgreene@edutooters@psychology
I obviously need to read further, but this stood out "Of all learning outcomes, academic performance had the weakest overall relationship with autonomy support."
Yup, because performance is distal. But I do think autonomy support still "matters" for performance, even if its effects are mediated. @rspfau@dsmith@edutooters@psychology
@estelle
It is good to have multiple voices raising awareness.
Keep an skeptical eye on anything Dave Troy produces, though. His past reporting (out of nowhere) centered himself and his research into Russian Cosmism when Gebru & Torres’ (and several others) had already been calling out EA and Longtermism for months or years. He made no mention of them or their work at the time. I’m glad he’s citing their work now.
@toolbear@estelle@sociology@ethics@kcarruthers The second paragraph in the story is about Timnit coining the term, not sure why you're going after Dave Troy who is a journalist reporting ion these things (and who has a much clearer understanding of the trouble we are in than most mainstream journalists seem to have).
Does effective self-regulation promote future effective self-regulation, leading to a virtuous cycle? This conceptual replication study indicates yes! Check out my Substack to learn more!
You know, I thought that shampoo ad was going to demonstrate that "rinse and repeat" was just an effective marketing ploy. 😀
From the other side of the couch, so to speak, the results relating to procrastination are of some interest. With 25-ish years of experience, I can confidently say that the onset of wide-spread procrastination is a correlate (with the usual distinction from causation) to an onset of a depressive episode. Similarly qualified, a reduction in procrastination almost invariably heralds an abatement of such episodes.
Think of a spiritual awakening, a near-death experience or a feeling of awe in nature.
Social scientists call events like these psychologically transformative as they quickly change some “wiring” in the brain. And here’s an interesting thing: Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy appears to tap into this concept and facilitate accelerated change.
@TheConversationUS@psychology yeah my autoimmunity firing off all the neurotransmitters in my brain when I’m sick has definitely given me so trippy, experiences that have changed me.
Living in France the last year, I’d return to my apartment and have to climb several flights of stairs. Some days, that last flight or two was a chore.
I found it helpful to trick myself. With only one flight to go, I’d feed myself a false-but-positive appraisal, e.g., “Great, I only have 2 flights to go.” This provided immediate and lasting strength to climb the final flight of stairs with energy to spare because in my mind I'd postponed the final flight.
I wonder if a treatment condition (between a depleting task and a persistence task) that varied appraisals across groups might provide a proof of concept that ego depletion is a thing.
I have always been interested in the use of the trace of learning behaviors, but LMS data are crude indices of what is actually happening. Did students bother to complete their homework? To get closer to study behavior, you must actually create learning materials with optional learning activities embedded and record how and if these activities are utilized. Khanmigo might be useful. Insert Learning (https://insertlearning.com/) might also be useful.
Linguists have discovered that humans vary their speech rate within sentences across all languages. For example, most people slow their speech down before saying nouns.
And, let’s be clear about stereotypes:
There is no inherent connection between the rate of speech and levels of intelligence, truthfulness or kindness. Language use differs for all sorts of reasons, and differences are not deficiencies.
@TheConversationUS@psychology When I was 17 my family moved from Arkansas to Alaska. It was a cultural shock in more ways than one. But my 1st day of school (I was a senior), a TEACHER drew attention to my southern drawl by replicating my speech in front of the class. I was already nervous, but then I felt humiliated. From that day forward, I practiced changing how I spoke. Now, decades later, the drawl will work its way out if I spend any time in conversation w/someone from my home state.
The idea of a "moral decline" is linked to the narratives we create about the past, in which events are idealised or simplified. On the other hand, human beings have a tendency to analyse events in terms of how we would like things to be. This example was published last year in the Times of India Reader's Blog:
"Moral values are fading these days. […] The culture is degrading day by day due to the effect of the western influence and movies which often mislead the younger generation.
[…] The low moral values have created unrest and turmoil in society. […] We can dream of a kind and honest world only if we nurture moral values and keep our ethos."
Such arguments, with many variations, can be found everywhere nowadays. The only problem is that similar arguments can be found in texts from many other periods in the past.
I think the rest is obviously bs, btw, as the absence of moral values doesn't create unrest and turmoil (if anything that absence would be pacifying), nor do I think that a kind and honest world depends on there being strong moral values.
THE MYTH OF “DECLINE AND FALL” by Edward Champlin (1996).
"Everyone knows that the Roman Empire “declined and fell.” The title of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century masterpiece The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is part of Western cultural consciousness. There is something deeply thrilling about the notion: Rome, the largest political and economic unit in the world before the year 1000, fell; are we too doomed to lose our power, our culture, even our memory?"
"But the notion of decline is an extremely difficult one. A political unit may indeed “fall” because of complex political, social, and economic reasons. The real problem comes when we, like the Romans, do not understand these reasons and, like the Romans, equate decline with moral decline."
"In the end, “Rome” did not decline; it changed, as all cultures must. "
There’s a better way to evaluate teachers. Find out how in this episode of the American Psychological Associatin Division 15 podcast, with Drs. Alyson Lavigne and Thomas Good.