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References for psychology of belief in "moral decline"?

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  • 16-08-2004 12:41pm
    #1
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,417 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    Hi folks -

    Having suffered a somewhat tedious :eek: weekend of lectures upon the topic of the 'moral decline' of modern society, its political institutions, the media, the educational system, various neighbours, relations + offspring, etc, etc, etc, it occurred to me [as it has done many times in the past] whether or not anybody's done any solid research into why it is that older people, in generally, tend to lurch to the political right.

    Various theories concerning this behaviour are easy enough to come up with [related to (a) the selfish view that ones own generation is simultaneously more intelligent than the preceeding one, and wiser than the one after, (b) the inability of older brains to deal with new situations, (c) out-of-hand rejection of non-conformant views leading to conditions of positive-feedback, (d) a religious faith-based conviction in the perfection of one's own views and the damnability of everybody else's etc, etc], but I've not seen any hard research upon the topic. A brief google-search doesn't turn up anything relevant looking, while a more lenghty poke about http://www.apa.org fails likewise.

    While this isn't a specifically 'skeptic' topic, it is related to next month's talk on Creationism, since the current political context in the USA couples evolution, very strongly, with something call "moral decline" [a google search for 'evolution' and 'moral decline' turns up almost 150,000 hits -- Ye Gods!]

    Anybody got any ideas/references?

    - robin.


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