Many recent news stories make you wonder if we're on a path to total and irredeemable moral bankruptcy.
Some of these are specifically related to social media dynamics:
In our world of research, strategy, and insights, there's also trickery going on...
If you want to protect yourself from these, you'll have to learn more about research methodology and biases instead of just buying a brand or blindly accepting a colleague's recommendation. Maybe the people saying that critical thinking will be the most fundamental skill post-AI are right.
Could being constantly exposed to the success of others, whether fictional or real, from people who were completely off our radar before, be pushing more people towards "anything goes?"
These mood swings have such a practical effect on markets like finance that there are indices like the CNN Business Fear and Greed Index, which exist precisely to try to measure herd behavior guided by both emotions. As Warren Buffett wisely said, when we see people we consider less intelligent than us making more money, it causes behavioral contagion and irrationality, and even enlightened people end up doing stupid things.
Could the promise of easy and fast money from markets like bets, dropshipping, affiliate marketing, and some varieties of information products and cryptocurrencies be making us more greedy? It's already impacting popular culture at some level. (don't open that link at the office!).
The problem with the amplified visibility of scams and supposedly easy money is that it can generate a feeling in those who are honest or outside this game of being left behind or not doing enough.
One of the things that characterizes the times we live in is the confusion of visibility with authority. Could some highly visible people be becoming "too big to fail" like the banks in 2008, because at some level visibility is always monetizable regardless of the controversies and atrocities they're involved in? Impunity is also a powerful incentive for bad behavior, both for those who are already doing it and for those who are thinking about doing it.
Could it be that, as a result, pursuing visibility at all costs has become part of the spirit of our times because it's increasingly seen as the fastest way to manufacture credibility and turn it into money?...
One of the most interesting ways to map trends is to see if new behaviors are nurturing markets that support these behaviors, measuring by proxy, as statisticians say. An example that fits here: luxury car rentals, with a complete filming and photography package, are swimming in money - is that a sign that the search for social proof using fancy watches, square houses in gated communities, and these types of cars is on the rise?
Now taking a step back, is this true if we look at the grand arcs of history and the data?
I've talked before about interpersonal trust in Brazil being among the lowest in the world consistently - with several practical implications, all undesirable. There's a very cool IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) paper about how this affects business and public management, and it certainly affects our relationships.
Our trust in the political class is consistently among the lowest in the world, and that's not news to anyone. The problem is that "as above, so below" as Jorge Ben Jor said and, before him, the hermetics. There are studies that shows, albeit in other countries, that lower trust in institutions leads to a greater tolerance for corruption, and these two things have mutual causality, that is, one thing feeds the other.
There are a lot of things that we consider within a moral gray area or things that "everyone" does that would be absolutely unacceptable in other countries:
All these things, among several other similar behaviors, suggest that we are moral relativists and not moral absolutists. There is always someone else that we see as having unfair advantages against us that we use to justify our worst acts: the State that takes so much from us while giving so little in return, the employer who demands more than agreed even while paying us so poorly, the evil gigantic company that screws over its customers - a cumulative effect of low interpersonal and institutional trust. No one is the villain in their own narrative, but at the same time the feeling of dishonesty is omnipresent - what kind of math is that? Not to mention the figure of the malandro (hustler), which is kind of a foundational myth of Brazil.
Besides these things, regarding values, Brazilians are reasonably consistent in a few things:
We also seem to be in a long transition from a Catholic morality based in part on "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven" to a different path, guided by the theology of prosperity and the growing number of evangelicals, and also by the increasing number of people who are not religiously affiliated. This is a hot topic in the Humanities and affects things like how we deal with success, money, and public policies.
Are we moving towards a new "Brazilian Protestant ethic," more adapted to a cultural context that is more every person for themselves and individualistic than in other predominantly Protestant, but developed countries?
It turns out that this idea of moral decline, which is understanding that our collective moral values are getting worse, is recurrent over decades and may be a collective illusion, another subject that I have already mentioned here.
Two researchers from Harvard and Columbia did a large study based on the analysis of 177 opinion surveys in the US (done since the 40s!) and 58 around the world, including in Brazil, and discovered that this feeling of worsening is constant since the 60s without clear signs of a real worsening.
But it's not that simple - another researcher of collective illusions who conducted several studies, Todd Rose, states that the illusions of a certain group become the private opinions of the next generation.
There are many factors here that may indeed be pushing us in this direction, but the counterpoints are also very strong, in a subject that is particularly difficult to measure, even because getting people to admit their own dishonesty publicly and the effect of others on them is not simple at all. It is very difficult to have a definitive answer and often, understanding people is like that.
But the real learning here is, if we judge ourselves using easy and cheap behavioral data (social media) but with a gigantic sampling bias, we run an enormous risk of taking the part for the whole and making silly decisions as a result, an increasingly common mistake in many companies - the trickery with social listening that I pointed out earlier in the text has everything to do with that.
What is certain is that we need, as executives and strategists, to stop treating what happens on social media as representative of our collective reality, no matter how much it is in fact capable of influencing us. And understand that many of us in marketing and communications are part of a "chronically online" bubble totally disconnected from the rest of the country, which makes hearing the silent majority increasingly important.
This same dynamic of visibility at all costs creates perverse incentives for publishing very impactful but extremely poorly substantiated things, like "Generation Z doesn't drink anymore" or "Generation Z traded Google search for TikTok." It's not just about having access to research, but knowing how to evaluate the origin and quality of these data and processes and doing what we researchers already do (or should do) all the time - imagining the countless ways we could be wrong before opening our mouths.
