where do you live? Yes, you who are reading these lines, I mean: do you live in the East or the West, or have you been transformed from one place to another because of the demographic changes that are flooding the planet today? Have you stopped the speed of your life spinning around your needs for a moment and thought about how much has changed the society in which you live (if you grew up in it from an early age) or even the society to which you moved since the age of 18 or more? Do you feel the change in the morals of people and society as a whole? Have you ever thought about the reason behind that... Let's review that together through this article that contains psychology from global links

moral change can happen within a generation or two

Going by the assumption that we can define broadly what is moral and what is not under most circumstances, evolution has played a key role in shaping our morality. We evolved in hunter-gatherer societies, and these conditions shaped many of our inherent behaviors. our ancestors lived in small societies where people's behavior would get noticed, so they had a genuine incentive to be good. Any moral transgressions would lower one's social status and decrease their chances of reproductive success. after all, it all comes down to who was the most successful at passing on their genes to the next generation.

Research shows morally laden scenarios get different responses from people of different ages.
Moral responses change as people age says a new study from the University of Chicago.

Both preschool children and adults distinguish between damage done either intentionally or accidently when assessing whether a perpetrator has done something wrong, said study author Jean Decety. But, adults are much less likely than children to think someone should be punished for damaging an object, for example, especially if the action was accidental. the study, which combined brain scanning, eye-tracking and behavioral measures to understand brain responses, was published in the journal Cerebral Cortex in an article titled "The Contribution of Emotion and Cognition to Moral Sensitivity: A Neurodevelopmental Study."

the extent of activation in different areas of the brain as participants were exposed to the morally laden videos changed with age. For young children, the amygdala, which is associated the generation of emotional responses to a social situation, was much more activated than it was in adults. in contrast, adults' responses were highest in the dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex areas of the brain that allow people to reflect on the values linked to outcomes and actions.

As much as we would like to tell ourselves that our moral decisions are based on reason, our emotions play more of a role than we realize. It is not hard to imagine that our emotions are far more effective at driving moral behavior than reason. It is easier to cause people to condemn someone by inducing their emotions like anger or disgust rather than by appealing to their rational side. while anger and disgust are "other-condemning" moral emotions, emotions like gratitude and awe are categorized as "other-praising." Emotions that cause us to act in specific ways are guilt, shame, empathy, and compassion.

the people have different beliefs about the rights of women, racial minorities and homosexuals compared with readers in the late 1800s, and different intuitions about the morality of practices such as slavery, child labour and the abuse of animals for public entertainment. Rational deliberation and debate have played a large part in this development.

Thankfully, though, evolution is not the only driver of morality. If that were the case, moral change would happen much more slowly. We are not at the mercy of our primitive emotional brains alone. as Richard Dawkins wrote, "We human mammals are the victims of a recurrent dispute: a tussle between the old reptilian brain, which unconsciously runs the survival machine, and the mammalian neocortex sitting in a kind of driver’s seat atop it." the neocortex, which came into play much later than the brain's emotional regions in the course of our evolutionary history, is the seat of our consciousness. It thinks and can override the primal responses of our "old brain"/"emotional brain"/"survival machine brain." Throughout our lifetimes, we have each witnessed how morals change, and intellectual reasoning is a big driver of such changes.

are plainly relevant to moral change. Indeed, one of the main drivers of moral change is human contact. When we associate with other people and share common goals, we extend to them our affection. Increases in travel and access to information as well as political and economic interdependence mean that we associate with many more people than our grandparents and even our parents. As our social circle widens, so does our 'moral circle'.

Whenever I see garbage trucks in the U.S. (which have been designed to be fully automated), I am struck by how this technology has led to dignity in a job that is, in most other countries, still viewed as menial and demeaning. This is a clear example of a material driver of moral change at work. This technology has shifted people's idea of what is morally acceptable for a garbage truck driver to be doing.

Proponents of the view that we are prisoners of our emotions might argue that moral deliberation and creativity are rare, perhaps restricted to people who spend their lives thinking about these issues, such as theologians and philosophers. Yet most people are regularly forced to ponder dilemmas such as the proper balance of work and family. Even though few of us write novels or produce films, humans are natural storytellers, and use narrative to influence others, particularly their own children.

It might seem strange to include affluence in a list about moral progress, but it has been shown that poverty reduction can lead to positive moral outcomes for a society in many ways. In her 2018 Darwin Day Lecture, evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman pointed out that as disease decreases in a society, people get less traditional, less autocratic, and more democratic and egalitarian.

Factors like gender, age, and culture are more significant in guiding our morality than we realize. Studies have found that people's moral judgments from Western cultures tended to be more utilitarian (harming one person to save five others) than those from Eastern cultures.Men across both cultures tend to be more utilitarian than women, while older individuals make judgments that are less so.

can shape our moral choices, too: At least part of the distinct divide between the North and the South in America during the slavery era was due to the fact that the geographical conditions of the South made it ideal for growing cotton, a labor-intensive crop

In fact, this topic (changing morals) is very sensitive, especially in the East. In the East, they mostly limit it to the relationship between a man and a woman, and in the West, it is measured by your nervous flexibility in accepting new things in society, such as homosexuality, whatever your thought, whatever your place where you live from an early age, or where you live now, all societies have changed, most people have changed, and for the worse and not for the better. Policy makers should pay attention to such things that gradually change society without feeling and for an irreversible stage.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/adolescent/chapter/influences-on-moral-development/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/parenting-neuroscience-perspective/202203/6-factors-drive-morality

https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=11970