Most social trends are not what they seem
By Adam Waytz | Published: 2025-07-30 15:40:00 | Source: The Present – Big Think
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We live in a golden age of discovering social trends. Have you heard about the crisis of democracy, the epidemic of loneliness, or the decline of empathy? Intellectuals, journalists, and politicians often cite broad social trends like these to explain the current state of the world, but it turns out that many of these trends are illusory.
Take for example “Crisis of democracy“,” The idea Since early 2010, the world has witnessed Democratic declineWith the increase in the number of countries Authoritarian and oppressive. A Historical article It was published last year by researchers Andrew Little and Rachel Meng It shook the field of political science By showing that most of the evidence for these claims comes from “democracy scores” based on expert programmers’ subjective opinions of, for example, whether elections in a country are free and fair. When examining more objective measures of democracy, such as electoral competitiveness and constraints on leaders (term limits, for example), Little and Ming find that global trends in democracy are largely flat – some prominent countries, such as Venezuela, have seen declines, while many others, such as Tunisia, Niger and Madagascar, have seen increases in democracy.
Similar measurement issues surround claims of “Loneliness epidemic“, an idea highlighted by medical experts, starting with Global Health Organization To the former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthythat people are becoming more lonely. Again, the data underlying this claim is mixed at best, as journalist Faith Hill noted in an article from Atlantic Titled “The myth of the loneliness epidemicHill cites A 2022 Meta-Analysis From studies of loneliness around the world, which states that “the results are inconsistent and therefore do not support comprehensive claims that there is a global epidemic of loneliness.” Universality analysis A study of loneliness trends among adolescents, a group considered to be at high risk for loneliness, revealed that from 2003 to 2017, adolescents’ self-reported loneliness increased in a few countries (e.g. Namibia) and decreased in a few countries (e.g. Seychelles), and most countries showed little change in loneliness over time.
Some trends are also susceptible to reversal. For example, this phenomenon is called empathy decline (also known as “empathy decline”).Empathy deficit“) refers to the oft-cited year 2011 He studies Led by psychologist Sarah Konrath, who showed that from 1979 to 2009, American college students’ self-reported empathy declined. However, A Updated analysis More recent data by Konrath and colleagues showed that empathy has rebounded since 2009. As Jamil Zaki wrote for FoxOther measures of empathy, such as volunteer work and donating to charities, are trending higher. Despite this evidence, recent a report From the Muhammad Ali Center reveals that most Americans He believes This sympathy has declined over the past four years.
Even trends with strong empirical support are more complex than they first appear. look at “Mental health crisis among young people“, which documents real trends in rising symptoms of depression and anxiety around the world over the past 15 years. However, the 2024 World Happiness Report, which consists of large-scale global data from Gallup, documents that “overall, globally, young people aged 15 to 24 years experienced improved life satisfaction between 2006 and 2019, and stable life satisfaction since then.” Despite all the discussion about the rise in psychological distress Among teens, however, there is relatively little discussion about rising happiness.
Because of the differences in when Data is collected, where It is collected, the tools used to collect it, and many of the trends that receive widespread media coverage are not as clear-cut as they seem. Why do they have such power to remain in our minds and in popular discussions?
Understanding patterns
My educated guess boils down to one word: Pareidolia“, defined as “The tendency to impose a meaningful interpretation on an ambiguous stimulus“If you’ve ever looked at clouds and seen recognizable shapes—a face or the outline of an animal—that’s pareidolia. As a social psychologist, a lot to for me research He studied how people impose meaning on things that are difficult to understand. Labeling something as a trend, even if it isn’t, can provide comfort when the world feels chaotic. Understanding data patterns helps us understand the daily cascade of information from news alerts about wars and plane crashes to reports on advances in artificial intelligence and groundbreaking medical treatments. Never before have we encountered such a diversity of information, people and opinions at such a rapid pace. In fact, if there’s any trend that I think is really strong, it’s simply that the world is becoming more complex.
Study 2024 Among the more than 400,000 survey participants who answered questions about social, political, and economic values by psychologists Joshua Jackson and Danila Medvedev underscores this complexity. Their analysis found that across 76 countries, between 1981 and 2022, people’s values varied widely across countries on issues ranging from abortion to immigration to the importance of obedience in children to the extent to which it is justified to accept a bribe. The world is not only changing, it is changing in ways that are not uniform.
Humans are known to be bad at processing this type of non-linear informationTo deal with this complexity, we seek and recognize sin, even when doing so is misguided. Research shows, for example, that people mistakenly believe that the United States has made linear progress in this area Racial and gender equalityAnd that Concerns about climate change have increased Over time, even when these phenomena are highly nonlinear. People also think wrongly The population’s tendency toward kindness and honesty has declined linearly over time, despite these moral aspects It barely budges Since scientists started measuring it. In fact, society changes much more slowly than people imagine, and over the course of decades, many social and psychological phenomena remain constant.
Being aware of social trends may provide meaning amid the complexity of the world, but in our quest to make sense of what seem like unprecedented times, it may be equally comforting, and certainly more accurate, to remember that much of what we are witnessing now is entirely before.
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