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Mostly cohort effects, meaning new people and not existing people changing.
Religions do not necessarily change moral intuitions. Instead, they appeal to existing intuitions and create Schelling points around doctrines which promote those existing intuitions.
Probably like anti-smoking. Had to do with empirical beliefs about alcohol, not moral intuition. The United States is still the most deeply anti-alcohol country in the West.
Cohort effects.
Iraqi, Pashtun, and Vietnamese moral intuitions are contra Anglo people's democracy.
Yes, every moderately educated person knows all of this. I want a grand unified theory of mind change that simultaneously explains all of these historical effects and simultaneously makes predictions about the future.
Most moderately educated people actually think all of this was just some kind of vague arc of justice bending towards equality, culturally of course. A minority of educated people might suspect a clearer image, but they can't prove it with certainty.
Great. That sounds really interesting. Are you prepared for it to be extremely politically incorrect, philosophically alienating, and mathematically dry? What you're asking for will look like a poison mixture of HBD, free will denial, and quantitative modeling at least at the level of stochastic calculus, which is generally considered post-grad and too hard for 90% or more of people to understand. Making something like this would take a lot of effort, potentially result in cancellation, ostracization, and denialism, to whatever extent it wouldn't just be ignored. Because the free marketplace of ideas hates hereditarianism, human instrumentalism, and math.
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"Cthulhu always swims left"
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The rate of "should be valid" answers to the question "Do you think marriages between same-sex couples should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages?" went steadily from 27% in 1996 to 70% in 2021, faster than the old "one funeral at a time" method of changing people's minds would allow. Although the results vary with age in the direction you'd expect, the 50-64 and 65+ groups are still at around 60%. The difference between retirees and young adults today is lower than the difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Views toward America in Vietnam were 84% favorable vs 11% unfavorable in the latest large-scale survey I could find; 84% was higher than in any of the other 36 countries being polled. Part of this is probably that they weren't as disappointed by Trump as most, but the favorable/unfavorable margin for America there was still nearly double their margin on confidence in Trump. 69% specifically said they like "American ideas about democracy", higher than any other country polled except South Korea.
Citation needed. This paper suggests cohort effects can explain a super majority of the shift. Very likely, there's a cohort effect kernel driving the change, with smaller period effects following as a result of mimesis dragging everyone closer to the new cohort mean.
"Are sexual relations between two adults of the same sex not wrong at all?" is not exactly the same question as "should same-sex marriage be legal" in logical terms, but the societal changes track pretty well, and we have a longer history of finer-grained data on the former via the General Social Survey. Figure 1(a) here gives some estimates of the magnitudes of intra-cohort changes. Before around 1990 there was no trend at all; afterwards every cohort who were adults in 1990 but still young enough to have a complete sample by 2005 shows some upswing; the ones still adults with a large sample size past 2020 show roughly 40% swings. That's a clear supermajority of the roughly 50% swing for the country as a whole. Each cohort usually starts out with more "not wrong at all" responses than their next-nearest-age peers, but by a few percent, not a few tens of percent.
You mean the new total mean? "50 year olds' opinions are changing to better match the opinions of 50 year olds" wouldn't have any effect.
But the total mean can't be affecting everyone - 35-49 year olds have been tracking right around the mean, and 18-34 year olds have been steadily moving away from it.
How do you come up with "very likely"? The data seems to match "peoples opinions are all being affected by their environment, but the older you are the farther back your environment goes" just as well.
I can't rule out that 50-year-olds are trying to mimic 25-year-olds' views specifically, except by anecdote (does the phrase "kids these days" sound like it's going somewhere positive, or somewhere negative?), but I'll note that even if this were true, it isn't what people generally mean by "cohort effects"; it would be something much more strange and interesting.
I read the whole paper, and it would appear that the way the article models that chart is by having there be a cohort change force which bubbles up into earlier generations through social pressure, where people shrink towards the new mean of each year slightly. Which exactly what I said.
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