- Every generation seems to lament the decline in public virtues, morality, and even decency.

But today's guest argues that these perceptions are generally not rooted in reality.

He's experimental psychologist Adam Mastroianni this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- Our guest this week is Adam Mastroianni, an experimental psychologist.

He's also the creator of the blog Experimental History.

He joins us today from Washington, D.C. Adam, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks for having me.

Great to be here.

- You know, your work covers so much ground and we wanna get to some of that, but let's start with what drew you to psychology in the first place?

- (chuckles) It was funny.

I was in a social psychology class my sophomore year of college and we were reviewing for the midterm and we were playing a Jeopardy game to review.

And I answered one of the bottom row questions right, which are supposed to be the hardest, and the guy teaching the class looked at me and said, "Hey, you're pretty good at this."

And I went, "Me?

Good?"

And I was like, well, you know, I do actually work pretty hard at psychology.

That must mean that I like it.

And then I thought, oh, that's self-perception theory inferring our preferences from our behaviors.

And then I thought maybe I should be a psychologist.

And then that summer I worked as a research assistant with Dan Gilbert, professor at Harvard, who went on to be my PhD advisor.

And I haven't fallen out of love yet.

- Dan Gilbert is sort of a giant in the field.

He's the bestselling author of "Stumbling on Happiness."

He's the host and co-writer on Nova's "This Emotional Life."

What was it like working with him?

What did you do exactly for him?

- I sat at a room with him for five years and talked.

(hosts laughing) Some of the five best years of my life, which really is what I value in doing a PhD is that there is something mysterious about developing your intuition as a scientist that I don't think you can write it in a book.

I don't think you can clearly explain the steps that it takes to get better at thinking about ideas.

I think you have to apprentice to someone who's good at it.

And in my opinion, Dan's the best.

And so we talked about ideas.

And really what we did was figure out why each idea that I brought was not interesting enough to continue to the next conversation.

And so that happened to 99% of the ideas that I brought, but that 1% that made it to the next conversation, well, 99% of the time it died there, but then the 1% that made it to the next conversation is what eventually grew into the projects that we worked on together.

And I think that's really valuable that I think you really should throw away most of your ideas, and that's how you find the diamonds in the rough.

- So you worked on a project with him that was called "The Illusion of Moral Decline," and it was recently published in "Nature," one of the world's leading journals.

Give us an overview of your findings.

- Yeah, this is actually my PhD dissertation that became this paper.

So there are three main parts to it, three questions that we asked and answered.

The first is, do people in general believe that people are less kind, honest, nice, good, friendly, ethical, whatever positive pro-social adjective that you wanna use, do people believe that people are less that way than they used to?

And to give you a preview, the answer to that question is yes, they do believe that.

The second question is, are they right?

Because if they are, it's a huge problem.

And the answer is no, they aren't right about that.

And in the third part, we ask, well, why might people believe in this moral decline if it hasn't actually happened?

And we think that there are two biases in the mind that can combine to produce it.

So that's sort of the elevator pitch for the paper.

- So why?

(chuckles) (Jim laughs) Why do people believe the quote-unquote "good old days" were better than today's days?

And again I should note that you found this across all demographics, and you can maybe get into a little bit of the actual research.

It involved lots and lots and lots and lots of work.

This wasn't just, you know, boom, boom.

But anyway, why?

Why?

- Yeah, I wish it was just boom boom.

That would've saved me a lot of time.

(hosts laughing) So why might people- - Five years of your life.

- Yes, exactly.

Could've done a lot in those five years.

So why do people think that morality's declining if it isn't actually?

We think there are many explanations that could play a role, but none of them can really explain some of the more surprising findings that we found.

And we think there's one explanation that has two parts that can account for all the data that we found and predict some that we hadn't seen at the time we came up with this explanation.

The first part is that people have a bias toward paying attention to negative information and they mainly encounter negative information about people that they don't know.

So in the media they call this, "If it bleeds, it leads."

In psychology we call this, "Bad is stronger than good."

We know that there's a negativity bias in attention.

If you've ever gotten feedback on your homework or on a paper you know this to be true because you forget every good thing that your teacher said.

It's the one bad comment or the few bad comments that outweigh everything else.

And so that alone makes it seem like when you look out at the world beyond the borders of your personal world that people are bad.

They're lying.

They're cheating.

They're stealing.

They're killing.

But that alone isn't enough to produce the illusion that this has changed over time.

For that you need a second phenomenon in the mind, which is called the fading affect bias.

This comes from research on memory where they find that the badness of bad memories fades faster than the goodness of good memories.

So for instance, if you, say, got turned down for your high school prom, it feels pretty bad at the time, but 20 years later when you remember it, it doesn't feel so bad.

Maybe now it's kind of a funny memory because maybe you dodged a bullet.

You later on found the person you spent your life with.

It's not so bad anymore.

If you had a great high school prom, it feels pretty good at the time and 20 years later it doesn't feel as good as it felt to experience it, but it still feels pretty good.

And this is on average what happens to memories that the bad ones and the good ones fade, but the bad fades faster.

And if you put that together with the negativity bias and attention, you can create this phenomenon where every day the world looks bad, but every day it seems like it wasn't so bad yesterday.

Even though if we had asked you yesterday, you would've said It looks just as bad, but it was yesterday that actually it was better.

So that is where we think this comes from.

- So what is it about the human brain that makes us remember the negative?

Is there any basis for that in evolution?

And I'm thinking, you know, of cave times, fight or flight, and, you know, you see the woolly mastodon and you remember that.

I'm just kind of making this up here.

But what is it about our brains that makes us remember the negative?

'Cause it absolutely is true.

- Yeah, I think there are good evolutionary explanations for both of these phenomena.

So why we would pay attention to the negative makes total sense that in a dangerous environment you're better off paying attention to the possibility of there being a tiger about to leap out at you than on, you know, the beautiful rainbow or the nice day or the pleasant thing someone said to you.

It makes sense that that is the thing that would draw your attention.

We are the descendants of people who paid attention to the negative things and survived.

It also makes sense why the badness of those bad memories would fade faster than the goodness of good memories because this is how we maintain our psychological wellbeing.

We reframe the bad things that happen to us.

We rationalize them.

We distance ourselves from them.

And that takes the sting out of some of the bad things that happen to us.

We don't do the same thing with the positive events in our lives, and that's why they retain more of their potency.

So it makes total sense that the mind would have these features, but it also has the downside that it can lead to an illusion where the world always looks bad and it always seems like it's getting worse.

- You know, Adam, I don't wanna oversimplify what you've just described to us, but I'm reminded of the bard of Long Island, Billy Joel, who said, "The good old days weren't always good, "and tomorrow isn't as bad as it seems."

But it seems like what you've described in this view that, you know, we tend to forget the bad or forget the good and remember the bad seems to be a description of American politics today too.

What's the danger of that from a political perspective?

- I think there's a huge danger especially in thinking that we live in times with unique problems and that things were simpler in the past and better in the past, and that we should flip whatever switch necessary to get back to those better times.

I think part of the reason why it seems like our problems are unique and more dire than the problems of the past is because they're uncertain.

Whatever challenges our fathers and grandfathers and ancestors faced, well, they might've been bad at the time, but they weren't so bad that we aren't here now to talk about them.

So I think about the fact that, you know, I was born in 1991.

I came on the scene just as the Cold War was ending.

I imagine it was pretty scary, but to me it kind of feels like, eh, that's sort of a funny story from the past that yes, wasn't it silly that people had to duck and cover under their desks in their schools under the illusion that this would protect them from nuclear war?

And obviously everything all worked out, so it couldn't have been that scary at the time.

But at the time, I know from surveys that have been done, it was very scary.

Whereas we think that no, the scary things are really happening now because we don't know how they're going to work out.

And so often a promise that leaders make to us, especially aspiring autocrats, is that they can return us to these good times when things were simple and we felt safe and we were wealthy and strong.

But obviously I believe that that's playing into this bias that we have that the past seems better, it seems simpler, and so we should try to reverse whatever put us in these complex and challenging and troubled times and get us back to that golden age which never actually existed.

- So Adam, last year you co-authored a paper with Jason Dana that was publishing the proceedings of the "National Academy of Sciences," "Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change."

Can you give us a summary of that paper?

- Yeah.

So here we took over 50 controversial issues, so things like gun control, abortion, belief in climate change, racial attitudes, gender attitudes, and what we wanted to know is, do people know how these attitudes and beliefs have changed over time?

And so we found polling data on all of these, and we showed the questions to our participants and we asked them to estimate how Americans had responded at the earliest time point for which we had data and at the latest time point for which we had data.

What we found is that people aren't very good at this, they're pretty inaccurate, which isn't that surprising.

It's a hard task.

But not only are they inaccurate, they are biased, which means if you average all their answers together, you don't get the right answer, which is what usually happens with the wisdom of crowds.

You still get an answer that's pretty far from the mark.

And the bias that people tended to have was thinking that attitudes had changed a lot more than they actually had.

And we found this is driven by most likely a stereotype that the past was far more conservative than it actually was.

We found that people underestimated how liberal attitudes were in the past by a lot, and they only slightly underestimated today, leading to this misperception that things have changed a lot more than they already had.

Although in some cases people actually got the direction of change entirely wrong.

For instance, people think that we are more against immigration today in the United States than we were in the past.

In fact, we are much more in support of immigration today than we were in the past.

The opposite goes for gun control.

People think that support for gun control has grown when in fact support for gun control has receded since the '80s and '90s.

And these misperceptions, I think, have a big impact on the choices that we make, the policies that we support, and the way that we think the world works.

So for instance, if you think that climate change is a big issue, as I do, and you think that a big barrier between us doing something about climate change is getting people to believe in it, well, then you may be surprised to know that actually belief in climate change hasn't changed all that much in the past few decades.

Despite all these efforts of raising awareness, it stays in the 60% every year.

And so if you knew that, you would probably take a different approach to get people to take climate change more seriously or make it their top priority rather than think that the main barrier to us taking action on climate change is getting people to believe in it in the first place.

And you can multiply that by 50, right, 'cause this happens over and over again on all these different controversial issues that people don't understand how these attitudes have actually evolved over time.

- Yeah, Adam, is there a...

I'm assuming that the reason why goes back to the bias that you were speaking about earlier about just we have an imprecise actual recollection of the way people thought and act and behaved in history.

Is that what it boils down to?

- Yeah, and I think it's not just inaccurate.

It's biased.

So if we just didn't really know what the past was like, everybody would be guessing somewhat randomly, but on average their answers might be right 'cause some would be off in one direction and some would be off in a different direction.

There's something that biases our vision of the past that makes us have conviction about this vision that isn't quite on the mark.

And so in this case I think what people are doing is using a stereotype that people are so conservative in the past, there was all this hatred toward minorities, and now all that's gone, we're so much more liberal, which is directionally true, that isn't completely untrue, but it's much less true than people believe that it was.

So for instance, one of these questions was, would you vote for an African American person for president if your party nominated them and they were qualified for the job?

People thought that in the mid 1970s only 25% of Americans said they were willing to do that, which they think grew to about 75% in 2010.

In fact, it starts at 75% in the mid 1970s and it goes to 95% in 2010.

Now obviously that's people saying what they would do, not what they actually did, but I think that's an important misconception that people thought that it was totally reasonable in the 1970s to say that you would never vote for a Black American for president, when in fact even at that time it wasn't really acceptable.

- You know, Adam, we recently had Peter Coleman on from Columbia University, social psychologist, who talked a little bit about sort of the presumption that our political opposites have more extreme views than they actually have.

And I'm curious if you're familiar with any of that work and if there's some correlation between the work that you're doing and our perceptions of where the politics and policies and attitudes stood in the past versus today might intersect with that kind of work.

- Yeah, it's funny.

It sort of intersects, but it's perpendicular 'cause I often find effects that go against what people in the political misperceptions literature find.

- Interesting.

- So in this instance, it actually doesn't make a big difference whether you are liberal or conservative in terms of the estimates that you make over time.

So liberal people overestimate the liberal shift in attitudes, conservatives do too by a little bit less, but it doesn't make a huge difference.

In fact, I also do some research on political misperceptions on this thing called the Ideological Turing Test, which in the original Turing Test you try to tell the difference between a human and a computer.

In the Ideological Turing Test you try to tell the difference between your ideological ally and your opponent.

And so I run these studies where, these aren't published yet, so I'm still working on this paper, but where Democrats and Republicans are randomly assigned to write statements either claiming to be a Democrat or a Republican.

So obviously half of people are telling the truth and half are lying.

And I tell them, "I will pay you extra money "if the people who read your statement "believe that you're telling the truth."

So everyone wants to be convincing.

Then I take all these statements.

You know, some of these are Republicans pretending to be Democrats, some are Republicans saying they're Republican telling the truth.

Same thing with Democrats pretending to be Democrat or Democrats representing themselves accurately.

I show these statements to a new set of participants and tell them, "I just want you to guess "if this person is telling the truth or if they're faking, "and I will pay you extra money if you do this right."

People are actually really good at writing these statements and they're really bad at picking out the fakes from the truth-tellers, which suggests that actually people have enough knowledge about the other side to pretend to be them.

That doesn't mean that they understand them perfectly.

There's obviously still misperceptions, but they're able to clear this pretty strict bar.

And in fact, you don't actually get any benefit for being, for instance, a Democrat reading statements that claim to be from Democrats or a Republican reading statements that claim to be from Republicans.

Everybody is just as bad when they're on the reading side of this.

So what I find actually clashes a little bit with what we often find in political misperception research, which is that they have no idea who the other side is, they totally exaggerate, I think there's also truth to that, but I think it misses this central point which people are actually pretty familiar with the other side and there are real and substantive disagreements that are hard to overcome just by getting rid of the misperceptions.

- [Jim] That's interesting.

- So Adam, your work came to my attention, excuse me, for the first time reading the "Harvard Gazette."

And mentioned in there, of course, was the blog you keep, Experimental History.

And so I started reading it and I could still be reading it if I had all that time.

It's unique.

It's funny.

It's informative.

Give us an overview of of the blog.

- (chuckles) Yeah, the blog is where I ended up when I felt like I couldn't express myself in academic literature.

That when you write a paper for a journal, you sort of have to do an impersonation of this scientist and claim that you know how everything works and claim that it's all very important.

And I wasn't speaking in my voice, and so some of my friends online who also write a blog under the funny name "Slime Mold Time Mold," they kept pressuring me.

They're like, "You should write a blog."

And when I started doing it, I felt like that scene, if you've ever seen the first Indiana Jones movie where he's got a staff with a ruby in it and he sticks it in this underground map and the light shines through the ruby and illuminates that point on the map.

I felt like I was in alignment with the universe in a way that I had never felt before.

So what I write about there, so I publish original research, I published a paper on there, you know, eight studies on a bias in human imagination.

I did that last November.

I develop theories there.

I write a lot about metascience and the problems in academia today.

And I encourage more people to get into the process of doing science.

So one of my most recent posts was inviting people to do what I think we pejoratively call citizen science, and I call just science, because I think we've lost a lot of the diversity of approaches in science that we used to have, and I wanna get people back into it.

So now I run a community where people are doing this all over the world, doing science in their backyards, building labs, which I think is really exciting because I think we've been missing this for a long time.

And I think there are a lot of ideas that haven't been explored because they don't fit well into the model of putting things in a journal.

So that's the idea behind the blog.

- It's a very democratic approach in a lot of respects.

You know, Adam, in our first question you said something about working on your dissertation, going through graduate school, and learning to throw away, I think you said most of your ideas.

And so now with the added publication pressure of producing a new blog every two weeks, I'm curious how that stands up.

- (chuckles) It just means I gotta throw away a lot more trash bags.

(Jim laughing) I mean, right now I have like 270 notes of, like, blog posts that I've begun, so I think the problem...

I mean, and most of those, you know, will end up dying on the vine, but really the limiting factor is time.

There are plenty of ideas.

- So one of the posts that I loved involved you contracting coronavirus, and it was titled "Help there's a dead CEO in my head."

And again, it was a combination of observation, information, and humor.

And I'm gonna read just a bit from that.

Quote, "There's no excitement left in catching the 'rona "this late in the game, and no one gives you much sympathy.

"It's like breaking your leg on a pogo stick "or getting your eye knocked out by a yo-yo: "'Oh, people are still doing that?'"

Hilarious.

Talk about bringing humor into your blog 'cause I just loved it.

- Yeah.

So when I'm not doing science, I do standup and improv comedy.

I've done that since college.

And I find that these actually draw from the same well.

I feel like I'm using the same instincts because when you are creating a scene on stage, what you're trying to do is let out your true self.

I mean, kind of the bible of improv comedy is called "Truth in Comedy."

And I feel the same way when I'm writing.

That, in fact, when I feel like I hit a wall and I can't get the words out, often it's because I'm trying to be too serious.

And it's only when I allow myself to be funnier that I realize what it was that I really wanted to say.

It also comes from this feeling that I have doing, you know, it's sort of my version of showbiz that people have a lot that they could do with their time.

They could be eating Pringles and watching Netflix.

Why should they be doing this?

Like, why should they be watching this improv show?

Why should they be reading this blog?

And this is also why I throw away so many ideas 'cause anything that I feel like doesn't cross that threshold for me, it goes in the trash.

That's why this takes a long time to write.

- So when I saw you do standup, I was, you know, pretty much blown away.

Wanna tell the audience the question I'm about to ask was not rehearsed.

We have not told you about this, so this is gonna be a lightning round.

Right now make up a joke about appearing on "Story in the Public Square."

- Okay.

So the background of this is I used to do this parlor trick of coming up with a pun in 10 seconds.

So they were gonna let me on "Story in the Public Square," but they told me I wasn't in shape.

(Jim chuckles) Square, yeah.

(hosts laughing) That's what you get for 10 seconds.

That's the downside.

It is technically a joke.

Yeah.

- It's a good joke too.

That's a good joke.

- I like it.

It's good.

(laughs) - You know, Adam, did your study of psychology give you any insights about humor?

I imagine that there's sort of a parallel in terms of your existence in sort of performing on stage, but also studying in the laboratory.

But did you learn anything in the study of psychology that was really applicable to comedy?

- Yeah, you know, I actually wrote my senior thesis and undergrad about the psychology of humor, and what I learned is I don't wanna do the psychology of humor anymore.

(hosts laughing) I almost think it is, it's much like trying to study beauty scientifically, that it's not that there's nothing you can learn, but the things that you learn don't feel like they are proportional to the experience that you have of discovering beauty.

And so, yes, I've ran these studies, you know, where people listen to jokes and they think that someone else is there, and does that affect how funny they think those jokes are?

And maybe, but it really depends on the kinds of jokes and who you think is there.

And so I found what I really wanna do is discover the beauty that you can only find through science and discover the beauty you can only find through comedy and to do them separately.

There's a famous quote about studying humor that people will often put in papers about humor, which is that it's like dissecting a frog.

It's pretty gross and the frog dies in the process.

So for the same reason I'm actually not optimistic about our ability to use our scientific understanding to really come to understand and appreciate humor more.

I'd rather just make people laugh and laugh myself.

- So you were on a British reality show and you came in second place.

Tell us about that quickly, because again that was like, okay, how do you get on a British reality show?

(chuckles) - Yeah.

- You got about a minute.

- I spent a couple of years at Oxford, and while I was there I was on this show called "Come Dine with Me" where four strangers are put together over the course of four nights.

We take turns hosting dinner parties.

So when I said I came in second, I tied for second.

So I didn't get first or last.

Someone got last because he threw a fit and kicked us all out of his house.

(hosts laughing) - So this episode went viral, you could still see it.

It's still a British meme, so whenever this (laughing drown out speaker) when he kicked us out of his house, whenever something happens in British politics, they repurpose that video.

So you can find it.

If you Google "Come Dine with Me big loser," I will be there sitting sheepishly on a couch as history is made.

- Hey, Adam.

- That's the end of the story.

- We've literally got about 30 seconds left.

You are one of the few... Everybody wants to have a blog.

Few people actually have success in doing it.

In the 30 seconds we have left, what advice do you have for young writers who are thinking about creating a blog?

How do they build an audience?

How do they succeed?

- Yeah, so because I only have 30 seconds I'll say I wrote a post about this called "Brain training begins in the hips," which is all about writing, and it is trying to figure out the thing that is inside you and make it outside of you.

It is a mysterious process, but the mysteries will all be cleared up if you read that piece and subscribe to Experimental History, I promise.

- There you go.

I think there's lots of layers to that lesson.

He's Adam Mastroianni.

It's Experimental History.

That's www.experimental-history.com.

You wanna check it out.

Adam, thank you for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week.

If you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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