A mural of an American flag on the side of a building in Verona, Pennsylvania in the United States. Photo / Matt McClain, The Washington Post
From Indonesia to Nigeria to Greece, people around the world see some slice of their fellow citizens as immoral or unethical.
But there is one country where the majority of residents say their countrymen are “bad”: the United States.
A striking survey released on Friday finds that 53% of American adults describe the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens as “bad” (somewhat bad or very bad).
In the 24 other countries polled by the US’ Pew Research Centre, most people said other residents there are somewhat good or good.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Canada, where Pew found that 92% of people say their fellow Canadians are good, while just 7% say they’re bad.
“Americans tend to think broadly that most other people are worse than they [themselves] are,” said Scott Schieman, a University of Toronto sociologist who studies the social psychology of Americans and Canadians.
Whether people are asked to assess how happy the public is about their jobs, or the cost of living, or the government, he said, there is a “negativity bias” in Canada, but “it’s nowhere near as sharp as in the US”.
Pew has never asked this specific question, so there is no data over time and there weren’t follow-up questions to reveal why Americans assessed other Americans so negatively and if this is new.
However, more than half of the countries surveyed showed a partisanship bias, meaning that people whose preferred political party is out of power “are particularly likely to view their fellow citizens as immoral”, the report found.
In the US, Pew found, 60% of Democrats and those who lean Democratic saw their fellow citizens as morally or ethically bad, while 46% of Republicans did.
Karen Swallow Prior, a Christian author who writes about morality and ethics, said today’s political leaders, along with algorithms and swarms of social media bots, fuel the idea that “bad” people are everywhere.
“Almost every moral issue has become politicised. We have two parties that cannot and will not work with one another and demonise one another, so it’s not surprising at all that our perception of one another’s goodness would be so low,” said Prior, whose most recent book is You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful.
Though Pew hasn’t asked the question on ethics and morality before, Gallup has asked something similar.
Since 2003, it has surveyed Americans on how they would rate the “overall state of moral values” in the country. Spoiler: not good.
The number has been in negative territory the entire time, meaning many more said poor or only fair, compared with those saying good or excellent.
Victoria Barnett is a scholar of the German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose name is practically a synonym for morality. She said trouble with finding shared morality is not new in America.
Bonhoeffer wrote in the 1930s that there were so many Christian groups in the US that “they couldn’t ever agree that something was heretical”, she told the Washington Post.
America, he thought, didn’t really have a shared creed. Instead, Barnett said, America is a political system in which religion and morality become used by political leaders, “which in turn can lead to great cynicism about … public morality and intense polarisation”.
Schieman said he wonders whether the US-Canada split stems from American politics. “The United States has so many internal contradictions right now, more than I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Canadians tend to blame people in power and elites, Schieman said. But “it’s not directed at other Canadians” the way Americans are assessing one another, he said.
A 2022 Pew poll showed a sharp rise among Americans in negative views about people from the other political party. Forty-seven per cent of Republican Americans and 35% of Democrats in 2016 said people in the opposing party were “immoral”. That jumped to 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats in 2022.
There were also large jumps in Americans saying people from the opposing party are dishonest, close-minded and lazy.
“When you have a deep degree of political polarisation as we have now,” Barnett said. “That erodes trust in lots of other ways. Especially right now where much of it is framed in terms of religious teaching. The framing of things as religious issues skews the perception.”
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.