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the American Mind (1987); Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996); Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West (2001); Francis Fukuyama’s The Great Disruption (2000); Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The De-moralization of Society (1996); Charles Murray’s Losing Ground (1984); Kate O’Beirne’s Women Who Make the World Worse (2005); and Diane West’s The Death of the Grown-up (2007).

It is not just conservative elites who believe that society is on a rapid downward trajectory; rank-and-file conservatives share this view (Klatch, 1991). In a survey investigating the social sources of right-wing attitudes, Lipset and Raab (1970) noted that conservatives were more likely than liberals to agree that “morals are bad and getting worse” and “the U.S. is losing power.” More recently, it has been demonstrated that right-wing authoritarianism, a construct consisting of conventionalism, submissiveness to traditional authority, and aggressiveness toward authority-sanctioned targets, correlates positively with scores on the dangerous world scale, which is comprised largely of statements about social decline (e.g. “If our society keeps degenerating the way it has been lately, it’s liable to collapse like a rotten log and everything will be chaos.”) (Altemeyer, 1988: r = 0.50; Duckitt, Wagner, du Plessis, & Birum, 2002: r = 0.43 in Study 1, r = 0.45 in Study 2).

Further evidence is found in nationally representative opinion surveys. For instance, in the 2000 National Election Study (Burns, Kinder, Rosenstone, Sapiro, & the NES, 2001) 80.2% of conservatives compared with only 59.4% of moderates, and 49.0% for liberals agreed that “the newer lifestyles are contributing to the breakdown of our society”; χ 2(2) = 67.87, p < .001. Conservatives also seem to be more likely to perceive decline in national security. In the 2000 General Social Survey (Davis, Smith, & Marsden, 2000), 72.8% of conservatives compared with 65.5% of moderates, and 64.6% of liberals judged that the threat of terrorism by foreigners was greater than it had been 10 years ago; χ 2(2) = 7.77, p < .05. When judging terrorism by U.S. citizens, 61.7% of conservatives compared with 53.2% of moderates, and 54.3% of liberals judged that the threat was greater than it had been 10 years ago; χ 2(2) = 7.45, p < .05.

Ethnographic studies of conservative movements are another source of evidence linking conservatism to perceptions of social decline. In a study of social conservative women activists, Klatch (1987) notes that respondents made frequent reference to social decline to explain the underlying motives of their activism. For instance, one of Klatch’s interviewees explained:

History has proven that a country can be destroyed by moral decay, from within. That’s what’s happening to this country today. . . . Why do you suppose that Rome crumbled? Because of moral decay. . . . The very poor and the very rich have always had loose morals. . . . But now it’s Middle America, the mainstream. It’s like a strong tree. It can withstand a lot, many things, but when you destroy its roots. . . . We’re destroying the roots. (p. 26)

Complaints about moral and cultural decline were also at the heart of opposition to liberalism in the middle-class community studied by Rieder (1985), as the following interview excerpt illustrates:

We were strict, and we respected our parents, but now? This sexual permissiveness is disgraceful, it’s like dogs in the street. . . . Back then we communicated with relatives, there was a terrific home life, but today they have the idiot box. We are losing respect for the family. . . . The way of living today, there are no values. People are drifting further and further apart. (pp. 133–134)

Themes of social decline are especially common in the rhetoric of the modern Christian right (Murphy, 2005a). Evangelical and fundamentalist Christian traditions often promote the view that moral decay is a consequence of the increasing exclusion of Christian values from the public square.3 Smith (1998) found that members of the more conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant faiths were significantly more likely to agree that “Christian values are under serious attack today” and “We are seeing the breakdown of American society today” than were mainline and liberal Protestants. The worldview linking the perceived assault on Christian values with social and moral decay is illustrated in the following excerpt from an interview with a member of the Charismatic evangelical movement:

America started really turning away from Christianity back when Darwinism and evolution came in. Then they took the Bible out of the schools and ever since it seems like America has gone downhill. There used to be higher family values, higher morals, whereas today, you know, anything goes! Even twenty to thirty years ago it was quite different. It is gradually getting worse and worse and worse. (Smith, 1998, p. 137)

These correlational and qualitative findings support an association between conservative attitudes and the belief that society is declining, but they do not illuminate the dynamics of this association. Recent experimental studies provide more definitive evidence that the perception of social decline can influence people to become more conservative. For instance, Duckitt and Fisher (2003) found that people expressed more right-wing authoritarian attitudes after reading about a hypothetical future in which social stability had declined than when they read about a hypothetical future in which conditions had become more secure and another condition in which they read

3 Although religious fundamentalism and political conservatism are often overlapping ideologies, important distinctions exist. In particular, although the religiously orthodox, including fundamentalists, tend to take conservative stances on most social issues, they are sometimes more economically liberal than moral and religious progressives (Davis & Robinson, 1996, 1999, 2006).

about a future that was very similar to the present. Moreover, the effect of information about change in social conditions on authoritarian attitudes was mediated by the effect of this information on participants’ scores on the belief in a dangerous world scale. In another study participants adopted a more punitive law enforcement stance typical of political conservatives after they read a story about a community in which crime and disorder had increased over time, compared with a control condition in which they read about a relatively stable community (Tetlock et al., 2007).

We recently conducted a study to further test whether a worldview emphasizing social decline can cause people to become more conservative. Specifically, we predicted that experimentally inducing people to endorse statements about social decline would change their political self-perceptions, causing them to see themselves as less liberal. Adult participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions designed to manipulate their agreement with statements about decline. We adapted a procedure in which the wording of statements is manipulated to force agreement or disagreement and thereby influence participants’ self-perceptions (e.g., Andersen, Lazowski, & Donisi, 1986; Monin & Miller, 2001). In the implausible decline condition, participants read and evaluated statements about social decline that were so extreme that a reasonable person would be forced to reject them (e.g., “All aspects of the world today are more dangerous than when I was a child”). In the plausible decline condition, participants read and evaluated statements about social decline paralleling those in the implausible decline condition, but in this case they were phrased so mildly that a reasonable person would be forced to endorse them (e.g., “Some aspects of the world today are more dangerous than when I was a child”).

After recording their agreement/disagreement with the statements in their assigned condition, participants rated their own political identification on a scale ranging from very conservative (coded –3) to very liberal (coded +3), and they also rated their likelihood of voting for a conservative versus a liberal candidate in an election on a scale ranging from very likely to vote conservative (coded –3) to very likely to vote liberal (coded +3). Scores on these two scales were significantly correlated (r(88) = 0.75, p < .05), and they were averaged together for an overall index of political attitudes. As predicted, participants in the plausible decline condition judged themselves to be significantly less liberal (M = 0.46) than participants in the implausible decline condition (M = 1.07; t(88) = 2.14, p < .05).

It may seem counterintuitive that participants were less liberal after being exposed to mild declensionist rhetoric than they were after being exposed to more extreme declensionist rhetoric. However, this finding is consistent with self-perception theory (Bem, 1972), which emphasizes that it is not the

information people are exposed to, but rather their behavioral reaction to the information that changes their attitudes. In our study, participants in the implausible decline condition were exposed to declensionist rhetoric that they could easily reject because it was so extreme, whereas in the plausible decline condition, participants were forced to agree with the milder declensionist rhetoric. And having agreed with these sentiments about decline they were then more accepting of conservatism.

WHY ARE PERCEPTIONS OF DECLINE LINKED

TO CONSERVATISM?

The belief that social conditions are declining may influence people to become more conservative because decline represents a threat to the social order, and conservatism is often a psychological reaction to such threats (Duckitt, 2001; Jost et al., 2003; Sales, 1972). Right-wing authoritarian attitudes, in particular, are founded on a worldview that emphasizes the ubiquity of social threats and the corresponding need for assertive mechanisms of social control to keep deviance in check (Duckitt, 2001; Duckitt & Fisher, 2003). This is also consistent with Tetlock’s social-functionalist framework, which hypothesizes that perceived threats to the social order motivate people to adopt a more conservative approach to controlling deviance (Tetlock, 2002).

At first glance, the emphasis on social decline may seem inconsistent with preference for the status quo, which is a core feature of conservative ideology ( Jost & Banaji, 1994; Jost et al., 2003). However, by pointing to the alleged destabilizing effects of past social reforms, conservative emphasis on decline may function to defend the status quo from further reforms and “social experiments” (Hirschman, 1991). Moreover, conservative movements occasionally do overtly challenge the existing system ( Jost et al., 2003), often in an effort to restore traditional social hierarchies, as in the George Wallace movement (Carter, 2000). An emphasis on social decline may be especially pronounced in these more reactionary versions of conservatism.

The conservative goals of shoring up the traditional social order may seem more sensible to people when they believe that society has lost its moral compass and is drifting toward chaos. Conservative social movements can attract popular support by giving voice to widespread perceptions of decline and offering political remedies. Throughout American history, from the jeremiads of Puritan preachers to Prohibitionism in the early 20th century to the family values campaigns of recent years, reactionary movements have voiced concerns about social and moral decline (Morone, 2003). The rhetoric of decline has also played a prominent role in right-wing movements in other settings. For example, the European eugenics movements in the early

20th century sought to reverse what appeared to be ominous trends toward cultural degeneracy (Schneider, 1991). Concerns about cultural decay also played a role in the rise of Nazism (Stern, 1974). In a study of essays written by 581 early Nazis explaining the motives and circumstances that drew them into the movement, Merkl (1975) found that the decline of German culture was a prominent theme in many essays. The following excerpt from a Nazi essay illustrates this theme:

Whatever virtues were once found among the Germans seemed to have sunk once and for all into the muddy flood. . . . Promiscuity, shamelessness, and corruption ruled supreme. German women seemed to have forgotten their German ways. German men seemed to have forgotten their sense of honor and honesty. Jewish writers and the Jewish press could “go to town” with impunity, dragging everything into the dirt. (p. 173)

A social movement that can represent itself as a response to social decline may have an edge in the competition for public attention because it is able to take advantage of the exaggerated perceptions of decline that people typically experience when they mistake changes in their own perspectives for changes in the external world. Social movements are more successful to the extent that their framings of problems resonate with people’s preexisting beliefs and experiences (Babb, 1996; McVeigh, 2004; Snow & Benford, 1988). Our research examining the biases that lead people to mistake changes in themselves for changes in the external world helps explain why decline is such an effective master frame for social conservative movements. The proposition that disorder is increasing is easy for people to believe, because many have undergone changes that enhance the salience of threats to their families and communities, and they ordinarily fail to appreciate the extent to which such personal changes have altered their perceptions. This process produces exaggerated perceptions of decline that conservative movements are able to effectively align with their agenda of defending or restoring traditional social arrangements.

Emphasis on social decline may also offer advantages to conservative movements because decline represents a loss frame, and the motivation to prevent or undo losses is typically more powerful than the motivation to seek gains (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984; Snow, Cress, Downey, & Jones, 1998). The same social change appears more substantial when it is framed as a loss than when it is framed as a gain (Eibach & Keegan, 2006), and people are often willing to take more extreme actions to prevent or undo losses than to achieve new gains ( Jervis, 2004; Snow, Cress, Downey, & Jones, 1998). For example, people will cheat on their taxes to avoid financial losses (Robben et al., 1990), and they are willing to make trade-offs involving otherwise protected values in order to avert social losses (Ritov & Baron, 1999). The belief

that extreme actions are justified to combat social decline was emphasized by Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber, explaining his motives for waging a campaign of terror against abortion clinics and gay bars: “The decision to act was the result of many years of my being confronted with the decline of Western civilization and the realization that only radical action would slow or halt this decline” (quoted in Vollers, 2006, p. 302).

Although the ability to represent their policies as remedies for social decline offers many advantages for conservative movements, it also entails certain vulnerabilities. Specifically, if the illusion of decline that forms a basis of support for conservative movements often is the product of a judgmental bias, then measures that correct that bias may dispel the illusion and thereby undermine the persuasiveness of movements founded on that illusion. The following section reviews a preliminary attempt to test whether interventions that prevent people from mistaking changes in themselves for changes in the external world can reduce the exaggerated perceptions of moral decline that are often prominent themes in conservative discourse.

CHALLENGING THE IDEOLOGY OF THE GOOD OLD DAYS

If the failure to consider self-change as a source of changing perceptions influences people to exaggerate social decline, then one strategy for counteracting these exaggerated perceptions is to direct the perceiver’s attention to relevant self-changes. As we explained earlier, people are unlikely to spontaneously consider the influence of self-changes because they tend to be naïve realists. However, it may be possible to induce people to take into account relevant self-changes by instructing them to reflect on changes in their own perspectives before they evaluate changes in the external world. We tested this hypothesis in a study in which adult participants, who were recruited while attending reunion events at a northeastern U.S. university, judged whether present-day adolescents were more, less, or as moral as adolescents in the participant’s own generation. Participants’ judgments of moral change were recorded on a scale ranging from –4 (adolescents in my day were much less moral) to +4 (adolescents in my day were much more moral). Half of the participants were assigned to reflect on how their own perspectives on morality had changed since adolescence, immediately before they evaluated changes in the morality of adolescents. This reflection on self-change was designed to prompt participants to consider changes in their own perspectives as a possible cause of their perceptions of moral decline. The remaining participants were assigned to a control condition in which they were not prompted to consider changes in their own moral perspectives before evaluating changes in adolescent morality. Finally, after judging change in adolescent morality,

participants in both conditions evaluated the persuasiveness of three mildly conservative arguments that attributed moral decline to inadequate discipline, lack of upstanding role models, and the corrupting effects of popular entertainment. Persuasiveness judgments were made on a scale ranging from –4 (very unpersuasive) to +4 (very persuasive).

Participants who were induced to reflect on self-change judged that the morality of adolescents had declined significantly less (M = –0.05) than did participants in the control condition (M = 1.17; t(34) = 2.19, p < .05). As a consequence of their greater skepticism about moral decline, participants who reflected on self-change judged the conservative explanations of moral decline to be less persuasive (M = –1.24) than did participants in the control condition (M = –0.26; t (34) = 2.11, p < .05). Finally, in the sample as a whole, perceptions of moral decline were significantly correlated with judgments of the persuasiveness of explanations of decline (r(34) = 0.33, p = .05). These results support our hypothesis that it is the failure to take into account relevant changes in their own perspectives that causes people to develop exaggerated perceptions of decline. The fact that participants found conservative explanations of moral decline less persuasive when they took into account their own changed perspectives suggests that enhancing people’s awareness of the perceptual consequences of their own personal changes might be a useful strategy for counteracting ideological interpretations of social decline.

CONCLUSION

The illusion that conditions are declining is often compelling, as David Hume (1777/1987) emphasized, writing, “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endued with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning.” Hume attributed this illusion to human nature, but a modern social-cognitive analysis allows us to specify the underlying mechanisms more precisely. We provided evidence that exaggerated impressions of social decline are, in part, a product of the human tendency to mistake changes in one’s own perspective for changes in the external world. Our research suggests that the illusion of decline is so compelling to people because something truly has changed—namely, their own perspectives. People can honestly claim to see more crime, disorder, and immorality in the world today than they did growing up. However, they fail to realize that they are seeing more of these things because they themselves are different now: now they are worried parents while then they were carefree teenagers, or now they have adult responsibilities while then they were free to explore life’s opportunities.

Theory and research has often emphasized how ideology can be a source of biased perceptions (Bem, 1993; Boudon, 1989). Our research looks at the relationship between ideology and bias from the reverse angle, examining how ideologies exploit and give political meaning to preexisting biases in perceptions of social conditions. Specifically, we find that when people fail to realize that personal changes are the source of their perceptions of decline, they are receptive to conservative movements that treat these perceptions as though they are real, offering their own explanations for decline and proposing reactionary solutions. Nostalgia for the good old days may be a phenomenon rooted in illusion, but it is a common and often deeply felt experience that lends itself to ideological elaboration and political exploitation.

Author Note

Address correspondence to Richard P. Eibach, Psychology Department, Yale University, P.O. Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520. Email: richard.eibach@yale.edu.

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