It’s easy to have the mindset that humanity is losing its collective mind. People blast music and take calls on speakerphone in public places. Retail and service workers brace for verbal abuse as part of the job. The online space feels dominated by trolls hiding behind screens while spewing god-knows-what. Add a steady drip of grim headlines, and it starts to feel like basic decency packed up and left the building.
That feeling makes sense. It’s also doing some creative exaggeration.
Once researchers step back from vibes and look at what people actually value and how they behave, the story changes. According to research summarized by ScienceAlert, people across the globe consistently believe behavior is getting worse, even as evidence points in a different direction.
Is the World Really Getting Worse? The Answer Might Shock You.
In a large-scale study of more than 32,000 people across 49 cultural groups, values like loyalty, honesty, and helpfulness ranked highest. Power and wealth landed near the bottom. An interactive tool built from data collected by the European Social Survey shows that this value ranking barely budged between 2002 and 2023 across dozens of countries.
Political identity, religion, education, and gender mattered far less than expected. Even people on opposite ends of major political divides shared strikingly similar priorities. Skeptical of self-reports? Fair.
But people really do care. There’s an idea that people just stand around and do nothing in tense situations, but this actually doesn’t hold up very well. When researchers looked at actual public confrontations caught on camera, they saw something else happening. In most cases, someone stepped in.
Then there’s the lost wallet experiment. In a global study spanning nearly 40 countries, wallets containing cash were more likely to be returned than empty ones. The reasoning was simple and very human. People recognized the loss would hurt the owner more.
Generosity shows up even without an audience. In a 2023 experiment across seven countries, participants were given $10,000 with no strings attached. In a sweet twist, people spent $4,700 on others and gave $1,700 to charity, on average.
So why does everything still feel worse? Negative behavior spreads faster. Social media rewards outrage. Extreme voices post more frequently, and automated accounts amplify conflict. During disasters, coverage often predicts panic even though cooperation usually dominates on the ground.
Believing society is collapsing carries a cost. Research shows people who expect selfishness disengage. They volunteer less. They pull back from civic life. That retreat can create the very breakdown people fear.
The science doesn’t deny harm or excuse bad behavior. It suggests something more wholesome underneath the noise. Most people still care about fairness, kindness, and showing up for each other. That reality just doesn’t trend as well as doom.
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