Imagine taking a big group of elites from the year 1700, giving them the tech, wealth, and economic options of today, also teaching them new facts that we have learned since then, but without putting them in contact with the people of today. If they held their values constant, and only adapted their behavior to these ways to achieve constant values, they would change many of their behaviors to adapt to this new context. However, it seems to me that their behaviors would be quite different from those of people today with the same facts, tech, wealth, and economic options. That (big) difference shows how our values have in effect changed since 1700.
I’ve been puzzling over what could have caused such huge fast value changes. I had been attributing much of it to cultural activism, but on reflection we’ve seen many apparent value changes in areas that seem to have little activism. For example, few seem to have advocated for the switch from cornerstone to capstone marriage. What else could cause such big change?
Consider three related facts. First, we tend to copy the behaviors and attitudes of elites, i.e., people we admire, and also to give them the benefit of doubts re their motives. Second, our book The Elephant in the Brain argues that most of us are quite badly informed on our motives re many key areas of life. Third, decades of psychology has found that we tend to neglect context in favor of intrinsic personal attributes when explaining behavior. Some have called this our “fundamental attribution error”. Values are important examples of personal attributes.
These facts tempt me to consider the following hypothesis: when elites change behaviors associated with virtue, observers tend to neglect context explanations of those changes in favor of value explanations. That is, observers, including the elites themselves, tend to attribute changed elite virtue behaviors to their more strongly or clearly expressing certain values. And perhaps even to their having discovered new related moral truths. This clearer elite demonstration and endorsement of those values induces observers to want to also more strongly and clearly express them.
For example, imagine that due to increasing wealth, falling family size, and stronger educational competition, elite parents switched to spending more time with their kids, a behavior widely seen as virtuous. Observers will interpret this as stronger clearer signals that spending time with kids is widely accepted as virtuous. Such observers will then be induced to spend more time with kids, which will make them feel and seem more virtuous. And that will confirm to those elite parents the strong and accepted virtue of spending time with kids.
This process amplifies the initial change in elite parental attention, pushing toward a larger overall change in parental attention, attributed to a new moral revelation: past parents were morally bad in neglecting their kids. Thank goodness new parents now see the moral truth that good parents are constantly with their kids.
The same process could happen re the switch from cornerstone to capstone marriage. Elites’ initially delayed marriage due to longer educational paths, but then the new models of elite marriage changed the shared image of the ideal marriage as one of mature people who know themselves well choosing others who match them well. And then the more that respected elites do this, the more it confirms for all that this is what virtuous people do. Bad people, in contrast, get married too young.
If this process has been common through history, it would have amplified most any ways that elites seem to more value some things. But when such changes were small, their amplifications would also have been small. Maybe what is distinct about the modern era is just how common are large changes in behavior due to big changes in the contexts of tech, wealth, social interaction scales, etc.