Most social trends aren’t what they seem

We live in a golden age of social trend-spotting. Have you heard of the crisis of democracy, the loneliness epidemic, or the decline of empathy? Public intellectuals, journalists, and politicians often cite broad social trends like these to explain the current state of the world, but many of these trends turn out to be illusory.

Take, for example, “crisis of democracy,” the idea that since the early 2010s, the world has experienced democratic backsliding, with countries becoming more authoritarian and repressive. A landmark article published last year by scholars Andrew Little and Rachel Meng shook the field of political science by demonstrating that most evidence for these claims comes from “democracy scores” based on the subjective opinions of expert coders toward, for example, whether a country’s elections are free and fair. When examining more objective measures of democracy, such as electoral competitiveness and constraints placed on leaders (term limits, for example), Little and Meng found that global trends in democracy are largely flat — some high-profile countries, such as Venezuela, have experienced backsliding, while many others, such as Tunisia, Niger, and Madagascar, have experienced increases in democracy. 

Similar measurement issues surround claims of a “loneliness epidemic,” the idea highlighted by medical experts, ranging from the World Health Organization to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, that people are becoming lonelier. Again, the data underlying this claim are mixed at best, as journalist Faith Hill notes in an article from The Atlantic titled, “The Myth of a Loneliness Epidemic.” Hill cites a 2022 meta-analysis of loneliness studies around the globe, which states, “Findings are inconsistent and therefore do not support sweeping claims of a global loneliness epidemic.” A global analysis of loneliness trends among adolescents, a group considered high risk for loneliness, revealed that from 2003 to 2017, adolescents’ self-reported loneliness increased in a few countries (like Namibia) and decreased in a few countries (like Seychelles), and most countries showed little change in loneliness over time. 

Some trends are also simply prone to reversing. For example, the phenomenon termed the decline of empathy (also known as the “empathy deficit”) refers to a much-cited 2011 study led by psychologist Sara Konrath, demonstrating that from 1979 to 2009, American college students’ self-reported empathy dropped. Yet, an updated analysis of more recent data by Konrath and colleagues showed that empathy has rebounded since 2009. As Jamil Zaki wrote for Vox, other measures of empathy, such as volunteering and donating to charity, are trending upward. Despite this evidence, a recent report from the Muhammad Ali Center reveals that most Americans believe that empathy has declined over the past four years.

Even trends with robust empirical backing are more complicated than they seem at first glance. Consider the “youth mental health crisis,” which documents real trends in rising depressive symptoms and anxiety around the globe over the past 15 years. Yet, the 2024 World Happiness Report, comprised of extensive global data from Gallup, documents that “Overall, globally, young people aged 15-24 experienced improved life-satisfaction between 2006 and 2019, and stable life satisfaction since then.” For all of the discussion of rising psychological distress among adolescents, there is relatively little discussion of rising happiness. 

Due to variations in when data are collected, where they are collected, and the instruments used to collect them, many trends that receive extensive media coverage are not as straightforward as they seem. So why do they have such staying power in our minds and in popular discussion? 

Grasping at patterns

My informed guess comes down to a single word: pareidolia, defined as “the tendency to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus.” If you’ve ever looked up at the clouds and spotted recognizable shapes — a face, the outline of an animal — that’s pareidolia. As a social psychologist, much of my research has examined how people impose meaning on things that feel difficult to understand. Classifying something as a trend, even if it’s not, can provide comfort when the world feels chaotic. Grasping at patterns in data helps us make sense of the daily cascade of information from news alerts about wars and plane crashes to reports of 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 is any trend that I believe is truly robust, it is simply that the world has become more complex. 

A 2024 study of over 400,000 survey respondents answering questions about social, political, and economic values by psychologists Joshua Jackson and Danila Medvedev confirms this complexity. Their analysis found that across 76 countries, between 1981 and 2022, people’s values have diverged wildly across countries on issues ranging from abortion to immigration to the importance of obedience in children to how justifiable it is to accept a bribe. The world is not only changing, but changing in non-uniform ways. 

Humans are notoriously bad at processing this type of nonlinear information, and to grapple with such complexity, we seek out and perceive linearity, even when doing so is misguided. Research shows, for example, that people mistakenly believe the U.S. has made linear progress on racial and gender equity, and that climate change concerns have increased over time, even when these phenomena are largely nonlinear. People also mistakenly believe that the population’s proclivity for kindness and honesty has decreased linearly over time, even though these aspects of morality have barely budged since scientists began measuring them. In fact, society changes far more slowly than people perceive, and over periods of decades, many social and psychological phenomena simply remain flat. 

Perceiving social trends may provide meaning amid the world’s complexity, but in seeking to make sense of what feels like unprecedented times, it might be just as comforting, and certainly more accurate, to remember that much of what we are experiencing now is quite precedented.