Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining^1,2. 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.

轶事证据表明，人们认为道德正在下降^1,2。在使用档案和原始数据的一系列研究中（n = 12,492,983），我们表明，世界上至少 60 个国家的人们相信道德正在下降，他们相信这一点至少 70 年，并且他们将这种下降归因于个人道德随着年龄的增长而下降，以及一代又一代的道德沦丧。接下来，我们表明人们对同时代人道德的评价并没有随着时间的推移而下降，这表明道德下降的看法是一种幻觉。最后，我们展示了基于两种既定心理现象（信息的偏见暴露和信息记忆的偏见）的简单机制如何产生道德下降的幻觉，并且我们报告的研究证实了其关于道德下降的情况的两项预测。道德沦丧的感觉减弱了，消除或逆转（即当受访者被问及他们熟悉的人或生活在受访者出生之前的人的道德时）。总之，我们的研究表明，道德下降的观念是普遍存在的、持久的、毫无根据的且很容易产生的。这种错觉对稀缺资源错误配置的研究具有影响³、社会支持⁴和社会影响力⁵利用不足。