24 JULY 2024 WorldWide Drilling Resource® The Un-Comfort Zone II by Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. Is Morality in Decline or is it being Manipulated? I’ve been thinking a lot about morality lately, and wondering where it went. I feel like morality in the United States has been in decline for many years. But is it? It depends on who you ask, where you look, or how you view it. If it is in decline, can we change the direction? According to a Gallup survey in 2023: 54% said the state of moral values in U.S. was poor; 33% fair; 10% good; and 1% excellent. 83% thought U.S. moral values were getting worse. 74% of Republicans said moral values were poor; and 97% worsening. 73% of Democrats and 80% of independents thought they were getting worse. Just because people believe it, doesn’t make it so, according to psychologist Adam M. Mastroianni, Ph.D. who believe the decline in morality is an illusion. Mastroianni says there are two phenomena. First is the biased exposure effect. Studies have shown humans pay more attention to negative information than to positive information, and the media reinforces the tendency by focusing on bad news. Because we’re mostly exposed to negative data about society, we get the impression that moral behavior is at a low. Second, we’ve got the biased memory effect. When people think of positive and negative events from the past, they’re more likely to forget the negative ones or misremember them in a positive light. The negative events are also more likely to lose their emotional potency over time. To get a better understanding of morality, I looked it up in the Cambridge Dictionary: “Morality, noun, is a set of personal or social standards for good or bad behavior and character.” It is my belief, however, that most people simply think of morality as the ability to tell right from wrong; and having the ability to interact and get along with others peacefully. I then wondered where we get this set of standards of good and bad behavior or character. Do they come from laws and the government? From organized religion or God? Or could they be an integral part of human nature? When I started digging into it, I learned babies show signs of morality as early as three months of age, well before they can learn it from socialization or rules. Research by Dr. J. Kiley Hamlin, Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, has shown babies can distinguish between good and bad puppets by showing favor toward the ones exhibiting nice behavior to other puppets and shunning the ones exhibiting mean behavior. At 12 months, babies have a sense of fairness and expect when cookies are passed out, everyone will get the same number. By 18 months, Wilson Cont’d on page 26.
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