#240 - The Illusion of Moral Decline

Jacob: 00:00:01

Hello, listeners.

Jacob: 00:00:02

Welcome to another episode of the Jacob Shapiro podcast.

Jacob: 00:00:04

I am really happy to have on the podcast today.

Jacob: 00:00:08

Adam Mastriani, a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School.

Jacob: 00:00:13

He writes a blog called Experimental History.

Jacob: 00:00:15

an article in Nature in June: 2023

Jacob: 00:00:25

And if you have seen me speak in person, or if you've been listening to the podcast for a long time, you know that I thought.

Jacob: 00:00:31

I think that this article is really, really good, and I think that it's good because it forces you to confront the fact that as human beings, we are hardwired to think that everything is bad, that evolutionarily, those that were able to suss out threats lived longer.

Jacob: 00:00:47

And therefore, we have this sort of complex where we think that things are bad, whether that is true or not.

Jacob: 00:00:53

And Adam and Daniel did some research on trying to evaluate that and on trying to evaluate whether the world is actually getting worse and what's going on here.

Jacob: 00:01:03

So I won't step on the punchline.

Jacob: 00:01:05

We're gonna have a link to the article in the show notes, and Adam does a really great job talking through some of this research.

Jacob: 00:01:10

Again, for me, it was hugely valuable because it put some data behind something that I thought that I knew, but that I didn't really have the data to prove.

Jacob: 00:01:18

And the data really does show that our brains are doing one thing and that reality is something very different.

Jacob: 00:01:25

And I think the hardest part of analysis, whether it's geopolitical analysis, investment analysis, business analysis, it is about recognizing the things that you think are true, putting them aside, and actually interrogating whether they are true or not.

Jacob: 00:01:40

So, I'm really excited about this episode.

Jacob: 00:01:42

I hope that this material is as impactful for you as it has been for my own career, analytically.

Jacob: 00:01:48

If you would like to talk about anything you hear on the podcast, you can email me at Jacob ognitive Investments.

Jacob: 00:01:55

I think that's about it.

Jacob: 00:01:56

Enjoy a rare episode that is just about why we shouldn't be as pessimistic about the world as everybody wants us to be.

Jacob: 00:02:03

Cheers and see you out there.

Jacob: 00:02:07

All right, Adam, I want to thank you so much for making the time to come on this piece that you put out in nature with Daniel Gilbert, the illusion of moral decline.

Jacob: 00:02:16

I have to thank you for it, because I've been using it as sort of, like, the final slide in most of my presentations for the past year, because I just think it's so good, and it's a so important, so first of all, thank you for that.

Jacob: 00:02:27

And thank you for coming on the podcast.

Jacob: 00:02:28

It's really nice to meet you.

Adam: 00:02:30

Of course.

Adam: 00:02:30

Thanks for.

Adam: 00:02:31

Thanks for having me.

Jacob: 00:02:33

So, I mean, I'm really here to just let you cook because I think that this concept is so important, and I think it explains a lot of the reason that people feel like the world is going to hell in the handbasket, even though I don't think it is, I'm actually fairly optimistic about what the next couple of years ahead of us look like geopolitically, which always seems to surprise people.

Jacob: 00:02:52

But why don't we just start at the very sort of top level?

Jacob: 00:02:55

What did you guys discover in the study, and why did you call it the illusion of moral decline?

Adam: 00:03:02

I mean, basically we call it the illusion of moral decline because there wasn't enough space in the text box to call it the illusion of decline.

Adam: 00:03:09

And kindness, niceness, honesty, goodness, friendliness, civility, ethicality, things like that.

Adam: 00:03:14

When we all look at them, we know that it's good.

Adam: 00:03:17

And calling it the illusion of moral decline is actually what gave us a bit of a headache, because some people read this and they're like, well, but what is morality?

Adam: 00:03:24

And we're very much like, look, we're not going to solve the problem of, like, what is good and what is bad.

Adam: 00:03:30

Like, philosophers have been working on that one for a couple thousand years, and we're still waiting for the outcome, but for the things where any reasonable person would look at them and go like, yes, I'd like more of this and less of this that.

Adam: 00:03:42

Like, have those things changed over time?

Adam: 00:03:44

And the reason I got interested in the first place is, I mean, basically spite.

Adam: 00:03:48

Like, I heard so many people say things like, you know, you used to be able to leave your door unlocked when you were a kid.

Adam: 00:03:56

When I was a kid.

Adam: 00:03:56

And now you can't do that.

Adam: 00:03:58

You used to be able to trust a man's word, and now you can't.

Adam: 00:04:01

Or, like, you know, we used to be led by people who, like, put the interests of the people first, and now they're all, you know, greedy criminals.

Adam: 00:04:10

And I just got to thinking that, like, actually, I mean, I'm a, I'm an experimental psychologist.

Adam: 00:04:15

If that's true, that's the story of the century.

Adam: 00:04:18

Like, we should really understand that if all that has happened, that's a remarkable change in human nature that's unfolding before us.

Adam: 00:04:25

Like, we should understand it and try to stop it if we can.

Adam: 00:04:29

And so the first thing we tried to understand is, like, is this a thing that people really believe.

Adam: 00:04:35

And so I pulled together basically a couple million survey responses that have been gathered for decades.

Adam: 00:04:43

And it turns out, yeah, people really believe this all over the world.

Adam: 00:04:47

Really, no matter how you ask the question, if you say, like, are people less good?

Adam: 00:04:51

Are they less kind now than they used to be?

Adam: 00:04:53

People overwhelmingly, everywhere they've ever been asked.

Adam: 00:04:56

And whenever they've ever been asked, they go, yes, yes, it's worse.

Adam: 00:04:59

It's worse now than it's been before.

Adam: 00:05:02

We ran some of our own studies on this, too, and then we wanted to know, like, well, okay, are people.

Adam: 00:05:07

Right?

Adam: 00:05:07

vel of niceness, like back in: 1987

Adam: 00:05:17

What we do have, though, are lots of surveys where people are reporting on what happened to them or what they are doing in the moment that are measured at several moments in time.

Adam: 00:05:26

So back in: 1987

Adam: 00:05:33

Like, did people treat you with respect all day yesterday?

Adam: 00:05:36

If it is true that people are getting worse and worse over time, we should see changes in these lines.

Adam: 00:05:40

We should see them going down.

Adam: 00:05:41

Like, yeah.

Adam: 00:05:41

thing for my neighbor back in: 1987

Adam: 00:05:45

And when you ask them today, they go, no, I didn't do that.

Adam: 00:05:47

But instead, they give exactly the same answer.

Adam: 00:05:51

And the third part is like, why might people believe this is true?

Adam: 00:05:54

But I've already dumped enough findings, so maybe we should unpack those before we.

Jacob: 00:05:58

Yeah, well, we will definitely get to the why.

Jacob: 00:06:02

set, I think it went back to: 1949

Jacob: 00:06:07

rvey data all the way back to: 1949

Jacob: 00:06:11

just every single year since: 1949

Jacob: 00:06:17

The answer was basically the same.

Adam: 00:06:20

Yeah.

Adam: 00:06:20

So on a question like.

Adam: 00:06:23

Like, do you think the level of morality in this country is getting better or getting worse?

Adam: 00:06:29

Which Gallup asks every single year?

Adam: 00:06:31

Every single year that they've asked that, it's pretty much the same.

Adam: 00:06:34

A majority of people say things are getting worse.

Adam: 00:06:37

And in that same survey, they also ask, what's it like right now?

Adam: 00:06:41

And people say, it's not very good, but that's what they've said the whole time.

Adam: 00:06:44

So every year, people say it's getting worse, and every year, people give it the same rating that they gave it the year before.

Jacob: 00:06:52

I guess at least they're consistent on that score.

Jacob: 00:06:57

How do you, because I have so many questions.

Jacob: 00:07:00

So one of the things I've read recently is this study that was funded by Carnegie, I think, and it talked about effective polarization.

Jacob: 00:07:07

And it was trying to wrestle with this idea that at least in an american context, most people actually agree on the big ticket issues.

Jacob: 00:07:13

Like if you take surveys of how people actually feel about immigration or abortion or gun control, like, we don't actually disagree.

Jacob: 00:07:22

But what does seem to have happened in the last 30 or 40 years is what they were calling effective polarization, which is just a fancy way of saying people seem to dislike each other more, or at least maybe the social norms that used to govern, whether you could say how much you disliked or distrusted something there has changed.

Jacob: 00:07:39

How would you explain that?

Jacob: 00:07:41

Do you think that that has something to do with this, or do you think that that's also in some ways a mirage?

Adam: 00:07:46

Yeah.

Adam: 00:07:46

So one thing that can be going on here, so this is something I've written on a little bit, is that it may or may not be the case that there's as much animosity as there used to be.

Adam: 00:08:01

But the question is, like, how focused is it on political topics?

Adam: 00:08:04

So I don't think it's the case that the average, like, if you asked each person in the United States 50 years ago, like, how much do you like this kind of person, how much do you like that kind of person, that they actually liked everybody more.

Adam: 00:08:15

It's just that now all of the things that you dislike about people are conveniently rolled up for you into the opposing party.

Adam: 00:08:22

And there's been some research on this that we have ideologically sorted a lot more, that there used to be such thing as a liberal Republican and a conservative Democrat, and now they're basically extinct.

Adam: 00:08:33

And that's not because those individuals literally don't exist anymore.

Adam: 00:08:38

It's because the most liberal Republican is now a Democrat and the most conservative Democrat is now a Republican.

Adam: 00:08:45

So it makes it a lot easier to direct your animosity all in one place.

Adam: 00:08:50

But, I mean, I've looked at the same data that we use to chart this increase in affective polarization over time.

Adam: 00:08:57

You can also see the decrease in all of the animosity toward, like, racial groups, for instance, that, like, some of that has gone down, or like the people that they describe in the survey as illegal immigrants and people like those people more.

Adam: 00:09:11

Those changes aren't huge, by the way.

Adam: 00:09:14

le bit more than they said in: 1978

Adam: 00:09:20

But already back then, people were like, yeah, like, the white people were like, I like the black people quite a bit already.

Adam: 00:09:27

And so anyway, this is a whole different topic, but like, I think there's a lot to unpack there as well.

Adam: 00:09:33

I think the short version is like, yes, more of our animosity is focused in the political realm than ever before.

Adam: 00:09:38

That doesn't mean that there's more of it overall.

Jacob: 00:09:41

Yeah, I imagine that one of the most difficult things for you, because we're talking about people's perception about whether morality has declined, and then we're talking about how whether morality actually declined.

Jacob: 00:09:51

And like you said, if you get into the fight about what morality is, you're going to be there all day and you're not going to make any kind of points.

Jacob: 00:09:56

But you do also have to, you know, hang the argument on something.

Jacob: 00:10:00

So how did you go about constructing enough of a moral compass to say, well, actually things are not good or things are getting better?

Jacob: 00:10:07

Like, how did you figure that out?

Jacob: 00:10:09

Or square that circle?

Adam: 00:10:10

Yeah, I mean, we were lucky in that the results are so consistent that it doesn't matter that much where you draw the line.

Adam: 00:10:19

So we excluded anything that we thought there'd be any reasonable disagreement about which direction would be good or bad for this to move.

Adam: 00:10:29

So something like abortion, I have my own opinions about, but I understand that people have very strong opinions on both sides.

Adam: 00:10:34

So, like, we're not going to use that as a measure of whether people are getting better or worse over time.

Adam: 00:10:38

Like if either side wants to do that, they're welcome to do it.

Adam: 00:10:40

But something like, are you afraid to walk anywhere within a mile around your house?

Adam: 00:10:46

Like, nobody thinks it's good to be afraid to walk somewhere within a mile of your house.

Adam: 00:10:50

We would all agree, like, it is better if, like, fewer people feel afraid because of crime in their immediate environment.

Adam: 00:10:57

And indeed, that question, if anything, fewer people feel afraid now than they used to, mostly hasn't gone anywhere.

Adam: 00:11:03

So that's the kind of thing that we're looking at.

Adam: 00:11:05

But again, the results are so consistent that you could draw it way to the left or way to the right and find pretty similar things.

Jacob: 00:11:16

That sort of brings up another question, which is, I think a lot of people at least ascribe some of the decline, at least in, I don't know, trust or whatever word you want to use there, to social media.

Jacob: 00:11:28

Social media is always used as this, in my opinion, somewhat of a red herring, for things are so much worse now because of social media.

Jacob: 00:11:36

Maybe it helps explain some of that things congealing down into ideological perspectives.

Jacob: 00:11:41

But I'm struck by the fact that if the data is so consistent going back that far, then it kind of tells us that social media doesn't impact this at all.

Jacob: 00:11:49

So do you feel that way?

Jacob: 00:11:50

Does it change things around the margins?

Jacob: 00:11:53

How does social media, if at all, affect the things that we're talking about?

Adam: 00:11:56

I mean, it could, but it's not enough to show up in the kind of data that we have, which, by the way, includes things like, you know, basically, have you seen any incivility online recently?

Adam: 00:12:08

We don't have data that goes back as long, but, like, for the five years or something that whatever data provider asked that question, it's the same on year five as it is in year one.

Adam: 00:12:17

The funny thing I think about social media is in some of our studies, we would ask people at the end of, like, okay, you said you think morality is declining.

Adam: 00:12:25

Like, why?

Adam: 00:12:26

Can you tell us more about why you think that?

Adam: 00:12:27

And for the minority of people who said it's improving, we ask them the same, same question, but for the opposite reason.

Adam: 00:12:33

And both sides bring up social media a lot.

Adam: 00:12:36

So, like, the people who say it's getting worse will say things like, you know, now you can, like, be really mean to someone anonymously online.

Adam: 00:12:42

And, like, that's why everyone gets exposed to, like, hateful videos and stuff.

Adam: 00:12:47

And I.

Adam: 00:12:48

And they're like, yeah, that's true.

Adam: 00:12:49

And then the people who say that people are nicer now who are in the minority, but the people who do say it are like, thanks to social media, you can see people all over the world, and you see, we're not so different.

Adam: 00:12:58

And we can connect across these things.

Adam: 00:13:01

And both of these things seem true on their face.

Adam: 00:13:04

The question is, which is true on average.

Adam: 00:13:06

And as far as we can tell the truth, neither of these is true on average.

Adam: 00:13:10

They either cancel each other out or they don't matter.

Adam: 00:13:13

And I think what's going on here is people have pre existing theories about how the world has changed, which they then look at the world for better or worse, and then they look at the world and like, okay, what could have caused these changes?

Adam: 00:13:24

Well, like, here's a big difference.

Adam: 00:13:25

Like, we didn't used to have a Facebook account.

Adam: 00:13:27

And so this feeling that I have that people are mean now and they didn't used to be.

Adam: 00:13:31

have the data for, you know,: 1985

Adam: 00:13:38

But I'm sure back then it would be like, it's.

Adam: 00:13:40

en know what was happening in: 1985

Adam: 00:13:42

It's because of the rise of, uh.

Adam: 00:13:45

It's because of the disintegration of the communist bloc.

Adam: 00:13:47

Like, I don't know.

Adam: 00:13:48

Uh, but whatever it was, was going on at the time.

Adam: 00:13:50

Um, I'm sure that's what people would have blamed.

Jacob: 00:13:53

Yeah, always mistaking the symptom, um, for the actual problem.

Jacob: 00:13:57

Um, I kind of want to get into the why now, too, because I think what we're talking about leads into it.

Jacob: 00:14:03

And, um, why don't.

Jacob: 00:14:05

Why don't I just start simply with that question?

Jacob: 00:14:06

So what did you guys, or what is y'all's hypothesis about why this is happening?

Adam: 00:14:12

So I think there could be a lot of good reasons.

Adam: 00:14:14

We review some of them, but a lot of the things that people come up as explanations for why people might think that things have gotten worse when they actually haven't, I think, can't explain a lot of the data that we found.

Adam: 00:14:26

And so here's an explanation that at least fits with some of the more surprising things that we found as well.

Adam: 00:14:31

It's got two parts.

Adam: 00:14:32

The first is that we know from a bunch of research that people tend to pay attention to negative information.

Adam: 00:14:38

They tend to both attend to it more, and media tends to serve it to them more as well.

Adam: 00:14:46

So there's kind of two effects rolled into one.

Adam: 00:14:48

We call this a negativity bias, and it makes total sense why this would be built into the human brain.

Adam: 00:14:53

Like, it's more important to think about the leopard that's maybe about to jump out at you from the bushes than it is about the rainbow that you might see this afternoon.

Adam: 00:15:01

This is an adaptive thing to do, even if it doesn't make us feel very good.

Adam: 00:15:05

So that's what makes the world look not that good right now.

Adam: 00:15:08

But you need a second effect to get this perception that it's gotten worse over time.

Adam: 00:15:14

And that's another cognitive bias that comes out of the memory literature called the fading affect bias, which is basically just a fancy way of saying, good things happen to people, bad things happen to people, but the sting of the bad things tends to fade faster than the pleasure of the good things.

Adam: 00:15:31

So, like, if you got turned down for your high school prom, it's, like, pretty bad at the time, but 20 years later is probably a funny story.

Adam: 00:15:39

Like, the badness of that memory tends to drain away, whereas if you had a great high school prom, like, 20 years later, that's probably not as good to remember as it was to experience, but it's still pleasant.

Adam: 00:15:50

And, like, that difference seems to be what happens to people's memories, on average.

Adam: 00:15:54

And this, too, makes sense that, like, we try to explain away the bad things that happen to us, we rationalize, we reframe, we distance ourselves from us, and this is part of what makes life possible to live.

Adam: 00:16:07

But it can have this side effect, which is when you combine it with a negativity bias, you're always looking out in the world, it looks like the world is bad.

Adam: 00:16:14

And you get this feeling that it didn't used to be as bad, because all the memories that you have from the past are, on average, better than the experiences that you have in the present when you're looking out in the way the world is right now.

Jacob: 00:16:27

Yeah.

Jacob: 00:16:28

So a lot of my work is in the investment world, and Daniel Kahneman did a study, I think it was in 82.

Jacob: 00:16:34

I forget sometime in the seventies or eighties or something like that.

Jacob: 00:16:37

And they ran some kind of experiment where they concluded that an investor is going to get way angrier if an investment advisor loses them $50.

Jacob: 00:16:48

Then they will be happy that the investment advisor gained them $50.

Jacob: 00:16:51

And when you take a step back and think about what that incentivizes investment professionals to do, which is not to lose money rather than to grow money, and to think opportunistically, it's always, that's always been interesting to me.

Jacob: 00:17:02

trip that I took in Europe in: 2014

Jacob: 00:17:11

I just finished my master's degree at the University of Oxford, and I was going to backpack my way through Europe.

Jacob: 00:17:16

And it's a long story, but I tore some cartilage in my hip joint, plain squash.

Jacob: 00:17:20

And so it was a choice between, could I come back to the United States and get, like, medical treatment, or because I wasn't going to damage it anymore.

Jacob: 00:17:26

I was just in, like, pain, and it was hard to walk.

Jacob: 00:17:29

Or was I going to backpack for two months at the end of my degree?

Jacob: 00:17:31

And I was like, fuck it.

Jacob: 00:17:33

I'm not giving up on this.

Jacob: 00:17:34

I'm going to backpack.

Jacob: 00:17:35

So I had this really intense athletic cane thing, and I was marching through Italy and Austria and places like that, and I even remember that people thought I looked so pathetic that they would let me cut the lines for the museums.

Jacob: 00:17:49

I go to this poor american guy who has this beard.

Jacob: 00:17:52

He's just terrible.

Jacob: 00:17:54

I'm telling the story to say, when I think back about those memories, I don't remember my hip hurting at all.

Jacob: 00:17:59

I remember, like, going to the museum and cutting the lines and blah, blah, blah.

Jacob: 00:18:02

I don't remember that I was in excruciating pain.

Jacob: 00:18:05

Like, I would get to my Airbnb at the end of the day and I would just lay there in pain, like, waiting to go home.

Jacob: 00:18:10

But I don't remember any of that stuff.

Jacob: 00:18:11

So I don't know.

Jacob: 00:18:13

It really resonates with me on a personal level, what you're talking about.

Adam: 00:18:16

Yeah, I mean, and I think what's going on there, like, this is basically the, like, the psychological explanation for nostalgia.

Adam: 00:18:25

Like, why is it on average, that that's the way that we feel about our pasts, rather than, like, gratitude to live now versus, like, to have the experiences we used to have.

Adam: 00:18:35

This obviously isn't true for every single person, right?

Adam: 00:18:37

Some people have traumatic experiences and they're glad to be in the present and not rather than being wistful for the past, but on average, for most people, it works the opposite way.

Adam: 00:18:48

And what I think is really compelling about this is, like, this is true not just in the US, it's all over the world.

Adam: 00:18:55

Which also makes sense why we would see people perceiving moral decline all over the world, even though obviously the situations in different countries are totally different.

Adam: 00:19:04

Like, some of the countries where people have been surveyed have just gotten out of civil wars, or they've had a massive period of economic growth, or they've had the opposite.

Adam: 00:19:12

And so you might think that this is totally driven by whatever recent experiences people have had that, like, if civil war has just broken out in your country, then you're like, wow, people are much worse than they used to be.

Adam: 00:19:22

Or if we've just come back together again, you go, people are much better than they used to be.

Adam: 00:19:26

Instead, the rates of people saying that morality's decline are pretty consistent across different countries.

Adam: 00:19:33

And that seems to be because it's a matter of how the mind works rather than a matter of how the world works.

Jacob: 00:19:40

You mentioned that we're sort of evolutionarily programmed to be negative.

Jacob: 00:19:46

You use the example of you have to worry about the leper jumping out to eat you versus seeing the rainbow.

Jacob: 00:19:52

It seems to me the flip side of that argument, though, is that we're also evolutionarily programmed to cooperate with other human beings.

Jacob: 00:19:59

There seems to be some evolutionary advantage to altruism.

Jacob: 00:20:02

I know that's a little bit of a controversial viewpoint, but I wanted to ask that because it's not just moral.

Jacob: 00:20:08

When you say moral decline, one of the things that you're saying is that people mistrust other people more, that they think that other people are out to get them.

Jacob: 00:20:17

It's not just the leopard.

Jacob: 00:20:17

It's like my neighbor I don't trust or something like that.

Jacob: 00:20:20

How do you square the difference between there's this evolutionary adaptation to view things negatively, but also an evolutionary advantage to partnering with other people and making your try bigger and defending yourself from bigger forces?

Jacob: 00:20:35

How do you balance between those two things?

Jacob: 00:20:37

Or are they apples and oranges?

Adam: 00:20:39

Yeah, it's a great point.

Adam: 00:20:41

So we have a little bit of data that speaks to this, that when people say that people are getting worse, you might wonder which people do they mean and what people don't mean.

Adam: 00:20:52

They don't mean that I'm getting worse, and they don't mean that my family is not getting worse.

Adam: 00:20:57

My immediate environments aren't getting worse.

Adam: 00:20:59

It's everything just beyond that.

Adam: 00:21:01

It's people out there.

Adam: 00:21:02

It's the people I read about in the newspaper or I see on social media that are one step removed from me.

Adam: 00:21:07

Those people are getting worse.

Adam: 00:21:09

When we ask people about people that they know, they say that they're better than they've ever been.

Adam: 00:21:15

So it's like each person is on their own little island saying, my island is good and getting better, but it's all the other islands that are bad and getting worse, and that's bad because those other islands could come invade my island.

Adam: 00:21:25

I have to coexist with all these other islands.

Adam: 00:21:27

And so, yeah, I think people are predisposed to cooperate, but the people you cooperate with are the people closest to you.

Adam: 00:21:34

And the people that we're most skeptical of are the ones that we haven't already cooperated with.

Jacob: 00:21:40

I think you've already answered this question, but I want to underscore it.

Jacob: 00:21:43

So one of the points that you're making is that this is not increasing, that it's sort of static over a long period of time, that the answers are always the same.

Jacob: 00:21:51

Like, it's not that people are thinking that the world is worse, but it's literally that there's always been a stable percentage of people who are thinking that the world is worse, and then maybe a stable percentage of people who think that the world is getting better.

Jacob: 00:22:01

So you haven't seen any even small increase in how this is developing over time?

Adam: 00:22:07

No, as far as we can tell, the rate doesn't change over time of people saying that things are getting worse.

Adam: 00:22:13

Now we have to put some caveats around that.

Adam: 00:22:15

Like, we don't have that much data.

Adam: 00:22:16

The further back into the past you go, it's not always the same question asked over time.

Adam: 00:22:21

So sometimes we're comparing questions that are worded a little bit differently.

Adam: 00:22:25

But all of that, I think, would argue in favor of seeing more differences over time, whereas the line appears to be pretty flat, which I think is another argument that people are probably wrong when they say this.

Adam: 00:22:36

Right?

Adam: 00:22:36

If you think of people reporting on whether the world is on fire, like, if more and more of the world is on fire, more and more people should be seeing the fire and saying it's on fire.

Adam: 00:22:44

Like, if it's small at the beginning, only a few people should say it's on fire.

Adam: 00:22:48

If it's increasing 20 years later, everyone should go like, yes, it's definitely on fire.

Adam: 00:22:53

If the equal number of people say that the world is on fire, it might be that it's always the same amount of fire.

Adam: 00:22:59

But when people say there's more fire now than there used to be, someone's got to be wrong about that, and that's what we see.

Jacob: 00:23:07

I guess that could be one of the ways that social media and just the Internet in general could be at least reinforcing the visceralness of this feeling.

Jacob: 00:23:15

Because before, I guess, it would be hard to find other people who agreed with you.

Jacob: 00:23:19

But now you can go out and seek out even people in other countries who say, no, everything is terrible.

Jacob: 00:23:24

And so you get to agree with each other over the fact that the world is terrible, and maybe you feel even more confident about that.

Jacob: 00:23:29

Whereas before, I don't know, maybe that was just a private feeling, or maybe you spent more time in your own island that you thought was good, rather than thinking about everything else that was outside of your island.

Jacob: 00:23:38

I don't know.

Jacob: 00:23:39

How do you think about that?

Adam: 00:23:41

Well, I mean, something interesting that we find is that the kind of people who feel like morality is declining don't seem to be their own kind of group.

Adam: 00:23:50

Or we at least can't find whatever demographic factor, like, separates that from other people.

Adam: 00:23:55

Like people who are very conservative say that morality is declining, but also the people who are most liberal, you might expect that, like, the oldest people would complain about decline the most.

Adam: 00:24:06

And that is true when you're talking about the total amount of decline in your life.

Adam: 00:24:11

But obviously, older people have been around to see more.

Adam: 00:24:13

So if you ask how much decline per year has happened, older people say the same amount as younger people do.

Adam: 00:24:22

So I don't think people even have to find others online to complain with.

Adam: 00:24:26

I think you could just turn to the person next to you, and they also probably agree with you.

Adam: 00:24:30

Even if they don't agree with you on anything else, they might agree with you on this.

Jacob: 00:24:36

I know that you're just, in some ways, you're just analyzing the data, but what lessons should we take from this?

Jacob: 00:24:43

Or what lessons did you take from this personally yourself?

Jacob: 00:24:46

Was it just to say, oh, the world is not actually getting worse?

Jacob: 00:24:50

Like, things are fine, I'm going to feel better about the world?

Jacob: 00:24:52

Do you think there are actual things that we should do to improve the way we process information to make the world better?

Jacob: 00:24:59

I know it's dangerous to ask you to make that leap, but I would just ask if you had that thought and how you would think about how you want people to use this information.

Adam: 00:25:06

Yeah, the main thing I thought was suck at everyone who ever disagreed with me.

Adam: 00:25:11

Now I'm right.

Jacob: 00:25:12

There's the academic.

Adam: 00:25:13

No, yeah, it's really that.

Adam: 00:25:18

Okay, so first, it's a different question as to whether things are changing for the better or the worst, like, which direction things are going and what level they're at right now.

Adam: 00:25:27

And, like, you can make whatever judgment you want about how things are right now.

Adam: 00:25:31

Like, I see a lot of reason to feel good and a lot of reason to feel bad.

Adam: 00:25:36

Like, I think we are capable of doing so much better than we do right now and that there are things that are unacceptably bad.

Adam: 00:25:42

So many people die of preventable diseases.

Adam: 00:25:46

Like, so many people die of want and then don't have to.

Adam: 00:25:49

So, like, we could do much better.

Adam: 00:25:52

However, we're also, I think, on a lot of these things, doing a lot better than we ever have in terms of there are fewer people actually dying of those communicable diseases and diseases of want.

Adam: 00:25:59

So, like, but there's still a long way to go.

Adam: 00:26:02

The other thing I take from it is, like, it is so easy to feel so certain about what's happening in the world and never question, like, where that certainty comes from.

Adam: 00:26:12

I mean, some of the people that I've talked to about this paper, they just don't believe it.

Adam: 00:26:17

There's like, no, I just.

Adam: 00:26:18

Obviously people are getting worse.

Adam: 00:26:20

And I'm like, well, you know, you can disagree with the data, whatever.

Adam: 00:26:25

Like, you could say, you know, it doesn't really answer the question.

Adam: 00:26:27

But, like, based on what are you so sure?

Adam: 00:26:30

Like, and it's basically like, well, I don't know.

Adam: 00:26:32

I look out my window and it looks worse and I'm like, yeah, I just, like, it's just like, you can't tell whether global warming is happening by just looking out your window.

Adam: 00:26:43

Like, you actually do have to look at data.

Adam: 00:26:45

Like, there are things you can't tell the crime rate by asking how many crimes occur in my front yard.

Adam: 00:26:51

Like, these things are just not representative samples, and they're actually really difficult questions to answer, yet they feel so easy.

Adam: 00:27:00

And what else in the world might be like that?

Adam: 00:27:02

andomized control trial until: 1948

Adam: 00:27:09

And it just seems like the most obvious thing in the world.

Adam: 00:27:12

But I think it was because we felt pretty certain about the things that we were doing and the results that we were getting that it never occurred to us that, like, oh, well, really, if you want to understand the world, like, well, sometimes you have to randomize people to condition and then compare them and like, yeah, I don't know.

Adam: 00:27:25

That same feeling, I think, is active here where people are like, yeah, I know which way the world is going.

Adam: 00:27:30

That's like, well, how could you know?

Adam: 00:27:32

Like, I worked on this for five years and I feel a little more certain.

Adam: 00:27:35

But, like.

Adam: 00:27:37

But it was really hard.

Jacob: 00:27:39

Well, I mean, to your point, though, like, people absolutely.

Jacob: 00:27:42

Like, all of these are questions that are too big for the human mind to process on its own.

Jacob: 00:27:47

So that's why you do get people who say, oh, it's cold out.

Jacob: 00:27:50

It's colder this winter than it was last winter.

Jacob: 00:27:52

Suck on that, global warming scientist.

Jacob: 00:27:54

Like, obviously, like, that's a, that's a, like a rhetorical move that people make, and they mean it.

Jacob: 00:27:59

They try and do this simple sort of, ah, I see this thing, and it's, it's not a great.

Jacob: 00:28:04

With the data that everybody sees.

Jacob: 00:28:05

So I don't know.

Jacob: 00:28:06

I think that's sort of ingrained in there, and I don't know how you get people to come out of themselves and to, I mean, it's just, again, it's not something that we're necessarily hardwired to do, I guess.

Adam: 00:28:17

Yeah, yeah.

Adam: 00:28:18

Because we are set up not to understand the world accurately.

Adam: 00:28:23

We're set up to understand it as well as we need to to accomplish our goals.

Adam: 00:28:27

And, like, you know, having the God's eye view of the world is actually nothing a requirement for, like, getting your, like, doing all the stuff that you need to get done during the day.

Adam: 00:28:39

So, like, it makes sense that, like, you know, actually feeling conviction about a bunch of things you know, nothing about might, in fact be adaptive, or at least was in our evolutionary environment for getting things done.

Adam: 00:28:49

And that's why we feel that way.

Adam: 00:28:51

This is, in part why I think it's really hard to learn.

Adam: 00:28:54

It's really hard to do science.

Adam: 00:28:55

Like, it's really hard to explore the unknown, because to the human mind, there isn't that much unknown.

Adam: 00:29:00

It's mostly known, or it feels like it is, even when it's not.

Jacob: 00:29:05

No.

Jacob: 00:29:05

And I mean, I think that's true of politics, too.

Jacob: 00:29:08

I mean, so much of my work is in geopolitics and in international politics.

Jacob: 00:29:12

s, you might remember, was it: 2021

Jacob: 00:29:26

And it was all because Joe Biden thought that everybody was going to blame him for higher gasoline prices, and he thought that was really, really important.

Jacob: 00:29:35

And I did a podcast around that time being like, we can't still possibly think that the president of the United States has anything to do with gasoline prices.

Jacob: 00:29:42

Right?

Jacob: 00:29:43

And I was no idea how many people on social media were like, Jacob, what are you talking about?

Jacob: 00:29:47

This is, the president is directly in charge of this.

Jacob: 00:29:50

He controls everything.

Jacob: 00:29:51

And I was like, okay, like, I guess.

Jacob: 00:29:52

I guess we haven't made that much progress when it comes things I've often.

Adam: 00:29:57

Thought, like, if I had a medium sized wish, what would I wish for?

Adam: 00:30:02

Obviously, if you can wish for anything, it's like, oh, world peace or whatever.

Adam: 00:30:05

But what if you have sort of a generic brand genie who's like, look, I can't work miracles, but I can give you a sort of mid tier wish.

Adam: 00:30:15

It has always been for people to not think that the president controls reality, that just, like, there isn't, he's not the wizard of Oz, like, pulling the levers back there.

Adam: 00:30:26

The world's actually really complicated.

Adam: 00:30:28

A lot of people making a lot of decisions about things like, they don't always know that much about.

Adam: 00:30:34

And it's a lot easier to think that, yeah, there's one guy at the center of it all, and you can vote for which one you want.

Adam: 00:30:41

And it's kind of scary to think that, no, a lot of this is baked in whichever person is in the chair.

Adam: 00:30:49

Obviously, there's some edge risks.

Adam: 00:30:51

Yeah, they could launch a nuke or something.

Adam: 00:30:53

That'd be pretty bad.

Adam: 00:30:54

The stuff they talk about, it's not that they matter zero, but they can't just pull a lever and make something happen or not happen.

Jacob: 00:31:03

Yeah.

Jacob: 00:31:04

ow, we can argue whether it's: 2008

Jacob: 00:31:27

Let's all join the WTO, and let's all trade with each other, and let's put away all of the terrible horrors of the 20th century.

Jacob: 00:31:34

And now that's gone.

Jacob: 00:31:35

Now we're in full gear, where there's suspicion and there's zero sum geopolitical games happening and there's war.

Jacob: 00:31:42

Biggest land war in Europe since World War two.

Jacob: 00:31:44

The Middle east is on fire, shipping, all these other things.

Jacob: 00:31:47

I guess there is some change in how international politics is working.

Jacob: 00:31:51

And one of the points I often make to audiences is we're not going back to globalization.

Jacob: 00:31:56

That random 20 year period.

Jacob: 00:31:58

It's really the aberration.

Jacob: 00:31:59

There's really nothing like it in global history.

Jacob: 00:32:03

And I don't know really how to explain it, but I think we've snapped into this new era.

Jacob: 00:32:06

Am I extrapolating too much on your argument, or do you feel like there's something there?

Adam: 00:32:12

No, I don't know if I had anything in the data that can explain why people think globalization might go on forever.

Adam: 00:32:19

Although here's something that's, like, sort of related.

Adam: 00:32:23

It doesn't speak to this on a global level, but it speaks to it on an interpersonal level.

Adam: 00:32:27

One of the studies we have in the paper tracks cooperation rates over time in the lab.

Adam: 00:32:32

So, like, they call them, like, they call them economic games, but when you see what game they are, you can see what economists think games are right.

Adam: 00:32:42

This is like you come into the lab and you do this prisoner's dilemma thing, where it's basically, I can choose to be generous with you, or I can choose to defect and get more money for myself, or I can choose to cooperate and maybe get more money for you.

Adam: 00:32:57

Whatever.

Adam: 00:32:58

They come in a few different flavors.

Adam: 00:32:59

And there was a study that tracked over time, just like we've run a lot of these studies, just baseline.

Adam: 00:33:05

How often do people choose the generous option?

Adam: 00:33:08

When I can just choose whether I'm going to send you money or nothing.

Adam: 00:33:11

How often do people do it?

Adam: 00:33:12

And has that changed from: 1956

Adam: 00:33:16

And what the researchers thought they were going to find was a decrease.

Adam: 00:33:18

Like, you know, we're all more selfish now.

Adam: 00:33:22

You know, this era of good feelings is over.

Adam: 00:33:24

They found the opposite, actually.

Adam: 00:33:25

People are more likely to cooperate in a laboratory now than they were 70 years ago.

Adam: 00:33:32

And whatever.

Adam: 00:33:33

There might be a bunch of reasons for that as to, like, well, who's coming into the lab in the first place, whatever.

Adam: 00:33:38

But I.

Adam: 00:33:39

For our purposes, we were like, okay, what do people think has happened?

Adam: 00:33:42

And people thought the same thing that the researchers expected to find.

Adam: 00:33:45

They expected to find that people cooperate less to the point where they were willing to bet their bonus on it.

Adam: 00:33:51

We're like, we'll give you more money if you get this right.

Adam: 00:33:55

So definitely tell us what you think is the right answer.

Adam: 00:33:58

And on average, they're like, we think cooperation rates went down by ten points.

Adam: 00:34:01

In fact, they went up by ten points.

Adam: 00:34:03

Now, that doesn't seem to be playing out on the world stage, but at least in economics laboratories across the United States, that's what's going on.

Jacob: 00:34:14

It's funny, too, because if the evolutionary argument is right, and it will take centuries, if not millennia, for this to work itself out, and who knows if we'll even be around long enough to see it work out.

Jacob: 00:34:24

But I guess, theoretically, the further you get away from the risk of the leopard jumping out at you to eat you at all times, the more you should be able to indulge in looking at the rainbow, I guess.

Jacob: 00:34:34

I don't know.

Adam: 00:34:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam: 00:34:38

This feeling of suspicion, this negativity bias, I think, makes a lot more sense when the downside risks are a lot higher.

Adam: 00:34:45

And, like, now, what we talk of is, like, downside risks are, like, losing money, which obviously is bad, but it's not as bad as falling off a cliff, getting mauled, like getting a spear thrown through your head.

Adam: 00:34:56

Like, these were the downside risks that we evolved to deal with.

Adam: 00:35:00

And so it makes sense why that anything negative would weigh so heavily in the mind.

Jacob: 00:35:07

Yeah.

Jacob: 00:35:08

Adam, what are you working on next?

Jacob: 00:35:10

So are you building more pillars and this castle of the world is not actually going to hell, or what's the next step in your research?

Adam: 00:35:18

I'm doing a bunch of stuff.

Adam: 00:35:22

I wrote a blog called Experimental History.

Adam: 00:35:24

That's where I do all of my work.

Adam: 00:35:25

Now I'm working on a book.

Adam: 00:35:29

I have some research coming out, hopefully soon.

Adam: 00:35:31

I've been sitting on this for a long time.

Adam: 00:35:34

That is, in part, about political polarization, where we do this thing called the ideological Turing test, which is, like, in the regular Turing test, you talk to a computer and talk to a human and see if you can tell them apart.

Adam: 00:35:47

In the ideological Turing test, you talk to someone who is actually your ally, and you talk to someone who's pretending to be your ally, and you see if you can tell those apart.

Adam: 00:35:56

So, we do this with Democrats or Republicans, that we have people write statements that's like, I'm a Democrat because.

Adam: 00:36:02

Or I'm a Republican because.

Adam: 00:36:03

But people are randomly assigned to which statement they write.

Adam: 00:36:06

So, some people are actual Republicans saying, I'm a Republican because.

Adam: 00:36:10

But some of them are Democrats pretending to be Republicans, and some of them are Republicans pretending to be Democrats.

Adam: 00:36:14

And we tell them, like, we'll pay you extra money depending on the number of people who think that you're telling the truth.

Adam: 00:36:19

So, like, do a good job here.

Adam: 00:36:21

Like, play your part.

Adam: 00:36:22

Well, then we take all the statements, we show them to actual Democrats, Republicans, and we're like, okay, some of these were written by people who meant what they said, and some of these are fakers.

Adam: 00:36:31

So, like, and we'll pay you extra money if you can pick out the real ones from the fakers.

Adam: 00:36:36

And long story short, the people doing the writing are great at this.

Adam: 00:36:39

They're really good at pretending to be the other side.

Adam: 00:36:42

The people doing the reading, trying to tell the truth tellers from the fakers, they're at chance.

Adam: 00:36:46

They'd be just.

Adam: 00:36:47

They'd be better off flipping a coin to.

Adam: 00:36:48

In most cases, which I think goes to this point you brought up at the beginning that, like, I think not only is there more agreement that people sometimes think, but, like, I actually think we understand the other side better than we expect to.

Adam: 00:37:03

There's all of this research on political misperceptions, like, oh, we have no idea who the other side is.

Adam: 00:37:08

And I think a lot of that comes from asking the question in a way that makes that answer very likely.

Adam: 00:37:13

Like, when you put money on the line, when you give people, I think, a fair test of how well they know the other side, they do pretty well.

Jacob: 00:37:22

So that's fascinating.

Jacob: 00:37:24

So, it's just a coin.

Jacob: 00:37:24

Like, so the people who are actually trying to suss out the phonies from the.

Jacob: 00:37:29

From the believers, it's a 50 50 chance.

Jacob: 00:37:31

Or is it even that they pick out the phonies more than the believers?

Jacob: 00:37:35

Or it's just a coin flip.

Adam: 00:37:37

Yeah.

Adam: 00:37:37

So, when you look at, like, their accuracy rate, like, on average, how often do they.

Adam: 00:37:42

Do they say true when it's true and fake when it's fake?

Adam: 00:37:45

Uh, it's 50% of the time the reason why they.

Adam: 00:37:49

Or, like, the kind of mistake that they make, because you could.

Adam: 00:37:51

You could get there a bunch of different ways.

Adam: 00:37:53

You could get to 50% accuracy by always saying true or by always saying false.

Adam: 00:37:57

You can get there by always getting one wrong or what or whatever.

Adam: 00:37:59

The reason they get there is because the.

Adam: 00:38:02

The fake ones seem true.

Adam: 00:38:05

Um, they're.

Adam: 00:38:05

They say true too much, basically that, like, the real ones look real and also the fake ones look real.

Adam: 00:38:12

So that's the kind of mistake that they make.

Adam: 00:38:14

This is consistent with other research on lie detection, where people, a, aren't very good at it in the first place, and b, the reason they're not good at it is because it seems like we default to thinking that people are telling the truth, and we only switch to thinking that they're lying when we get kind of overwhelming evidence, which makes sense.

Adam: 00:38:33

Again, evolutionarily speaking.

Adam: 00:38:35

Like, in order to cooperate with people, you kind of have to lean toward believing that people are.

Adam: 00:38:42

Are doing what they say they're doing.

Adam: 00:38:44

If you're super skeptical, like, yeah, maybe you do your homework and your due diligence, but by the time you've done it, like, the deal has moved on, like, you sort of have to take the risk in order to cooperate with other humans, but that's a mistake we see them making.

Jacob: 00:38:59

That's so interesting.

Jacob: 00:39:00

So when I'm doing speaking events or speaking in front of audiences, I'm talking about politics.

Jacob: 00:39:06

So I always have to disarm them at first because they're expecting an ideologue or somebody who's going to tell them something that they hate.

Jacob: 00:39:12

And I always have to go and say, hey, I'm just here to be objective.

Jacob: 00:39:16

And if any of you can guess who I voted for in the last presidential election, I did my job incorrectly.

Jacob: 00:39:21

So I am trying here to stay data driven and so that you have no idea who I vote for or what my personal opinions are, and I can't.

Jacob: 00:39:29

Every time I give a speech, there's usually two or three people who come afterwards and say, I know.

Jacob: 00:39:34

I know who you really like.

Jacob: 00:39:36

And my favorite example of this was an event.

Jacob: 00:39:38

It was in March in Wisconsin, and this guy came up to me, and he was like, I've got you.

Jacob: 00:39:42

You were good, but you gave it away.

Jacob: 00:39:44

And I was like, great.

Jacob: 00:39:45

Who am I supporting in the current presidential election?

Jacob: 00:39:47

He was like, you're for Vivek, aren't you?

Jacob: 00:39:50

And I was like, nope, I have no.

Jacob: 00:39:52

I really did my job well, because the one thing I will tell you listeners, Vivek was not my guy, but I always thought that was just that people project their own sort of opinions onto you.

Jacob: 00:40:02

But I guess if you're trying to suss, it's a sort of a different thing because I'm not giving them a.

Jacob: 00:40:07

What they want.

Jacob: 00:40:09

I'm being intentionally contrarian and obfuscating with them, and I have to ask them to suss it out.

Jacob: 00:40:13

And I guess when you don't have information, you just assume that everybody is like you.

Adam: 00:40:18

Yeah.

Adam: 00:40:19

And whatever theories people have as to, like, how I tell what someone's thinking beyond what they're saying, they feel very confident in it.

Adam: 00:40:28

Like, oh, I know you're telling the truth because you looked this certain way while you did it, or I know you're lying because you scratched your nose at just this moment.

Adam: 00:40:36

And as far as the research has been able to figure out, like, these things are all bullshit.

Adam: 00:40:41

They make people feel really confident, but they don't actually correspond to the truth that, like, yeah, when someone's lying, they can seem really hesitant, or they can seem really confident, or like, when someone's telling the truth, they can be.

Adam: 00:40:56

They can look you directly in the eye or that could be someone who's really good at lying.

Adam: 00:41:01

So.

Adam: 00:41:02

So, yeah, it is.

Adam: 00:41:03

So anyone who's like, yeah, I'm really good at picking people out.

Adam: 00:41:07

It just means that they're really confident.

Adam: 00:41:08

It doesn't mean that they're actually any good at it at all.

Jacob: 00:41:11

Yeah, I guess the only, I mean, maybe.

Jacob: 00:41:12

Maybe you can tell me if somebody's done research on this.

Jacob: 00:41:14

I feel like the way to test that would be poker players, because some people are extremely good at poker, and that's a game where you have to, a, be able to lie and b, be able to suss out on a more than 50% level, like whether somebody else is lying in response.

Jacob: 00:41:28

Do you know if there's been any research on sort of that, whether it's poker or something else, where somebody like, are there people who are more attenuated in that way?

Adam: 00:41:36

You know, I don't.

Adam: 00:41:37

It's a good question.

Adam: 00:41:38

And if anybody's going to be good at this, I agree it would be them, in part because you get feedback.

Adam: 00:41:43

Right.

Adam: 00:41:43

And the feedback is hard to ignore because you're gaining or losing money depending on how well you're doing.

Adam: 00:41:49

One population I know that's been studied on this are like police interrogate interrogators who don't do well.

Adam: 00:41:55

I think part of this is like, you don't get feedback at the end of the interrogation as to whether you were right or not right.

Adam: 00:42:01

It's not like the criminals like.

Adam: 00:42:02

Okay, I'm gonna tell you for real whether that I did do it.

Adam: 00:42:06

You got me.

Adam: 00:42:06

Like, you might not even know at the end of the trial.

Adam: 00:42:09

Like, you might never know.

Adam: 00:42:11

And so how can you get better if you don't have feedback?

Adam: 00:42:15

Yeah.

Jacob: 00:42:17

Yeah.

Jacob: 00:42:18

Adam, I could go on with you all day, but I want to be respectful of your time.

Jacob: 00:42:21

So you already sort of mentioned it, but tell the listeners where they can find.

Jacob: 00:42:24

Find more about your work.

Adam: 00:42:26

Yeah, I do.

Adam: 00:42:28

Everything I do is now on experimental history.

Adam: 00:42:31

It's a sub stack, so you can find me there.

Jacob: 00:42:35

All right, well, thank you again for making the time, and thank you for writing this paper.

Jacob: 00:42:38

It has been a source of great comfort for me, and I'm a serial optimist, so it was nice to read something that was like, hey, your serial optimism actually is somewhat warranted.

Jacob: 00:42:51

It's not often the response that I get, so thank you so much for that, too.

Adam: 00:42:54

Of course.

Adam: 00:42:54

Thanks for having me.

Adam: 00:42:56

Be back.

Jacob: 00:42:58

Oh, God.

Jacob: 00:42:59

I'll now self employ.