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Mike Sowden's avatar

This is all so fabulous and immensely reassuring, and I'm going to sip it like a fine wine for the rest of the day.

Thank you for being so rigorously interested in this question that you put such an immense amount of work into concluding "we're not sure, but if one thing looks likely, it's that all this absolute certainty sure looks dead wrong". The best and wisest of answers.

Congratulations, Adam (and Dan). Amazing work.

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James F. Richardson's avatar

Is it possible Adam that the persistence of perceiving ‘moral decline’ is actually caused by accelerated shifts in the definition of morality itself? Morality is only an interpretive symbol system. It is overlaid linguistically onto behavior patterns .The extent of your research is impressive but most of the survey items you list are not really measures of ‘behavior’ such as: when I have a gift most recently it was reciprocated within 12 months. No one writes surveys like this in part because we doubt anyone could answer them accurately. A lot of moral behavior is not capturable except through direct observation and mass ethnography (something no one has figured out and only the Feds have the resources to execute.

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