I don't have a good answer. I agree with #1, but think #2 is largely an issue in the US and England. I also feel like society is sufficiently a construct that there might not actually be any difference between a widely held confirmation bias and whatever passes for reality when it comes to social issues.
There may be. Back in my history of colonial America class, low these many decades ago, I learned that there are objective criteria for determining the morality of the time. Measurements such as the "Bastardy rate" looked at marriage records compared to date of first child birth. Introduction of birth control to a society can be detected by the timing of births. We didn't go into the subject very deeply, but it was clear that various social changes can be measured using objective public records.
In short, it is likely possible to resolve the dilemma, but I can't give you a specific answer.
I have such a major twitch with "bastardy" being the first thing you brought up. I mean, maybe children being raised by single parents... somewhere down the list. (Since there are data to support this as having effects on children.) But marriage, and first?
I was a bit startled myself when my history professor used the term. But he used it in a very technical sense as a measure of the morality of the times with premarital sex as one metric. Such are the topics that are remembered after more than four decades from taking the class.
Think of things from these days and look if there's been something similar on a systematic level in a past time episode of your choice. For example: Have people been brutal and antisocial in the same intensity as today, say, 20 years ago? Summarize for yourself what is similar and where you find the differences. And where you find possible differences to today, how much of a meaning or change did they make to the bigger picture? Like, people back then still had some little sense of mercy while they seem to have lost it more and more until today. Or, the social status of people who did it wasn't like it is today. Among kids they remained outsiders 'cause no-one wanted to have these bullies around himself who beat up everyone just for fun. In society they didn't get the best positions, they became criminals and sooner or later ended in jail or a least with the bottle stuck to their mouths.
Certain parties have increasingly-good coverage of data about breaking the speed limit, for that one. (Do you see traffic getting more aggressive in Seattle? I haven't seen that.) Ethics and IRB sanctions aside, social-science researchers could stage public situations that would call for empathy, and repeat over time to see how responses change over the years. Can't think of good clean sources of 'natural experiment' data on empathy that would already exist... I do think there's real social history encoded in the online conversations of the past 20 years, if we can analyze it.
The trend that worries me is social sorting -- I think our empathy for in-group is just fine, but empathy for out-group is the problem. And I'd hypothesize our empathy as a function of the social relation we stand in to somebody hasn't changed, but we stand in more distant and more negative social relations to more people
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You know what somebody should do? Re-run the Milgram chain letter experiment again, and over time. This is the other one, the experiment where he made an estimate of social distance between two people: asked Alice to get a chain letter to Bob by sending it to one of Alice's acquaintances "on a first-name basis", asking that person to do the same.
Has the mean number of hops changed over time? Has the distribution broadened? Run it with two people chosen uniformly from the whole population[1], versus pairs chosen to be same or different in, say, urban/rural location, race, class. Which social divide is the biggest one, and how have their sizes changed over time?
(I came for the historical data, but I'd stay for data today about distribution and size of social divides. How hard would this really be to run?)
oops, Procrustesed the footnote: [1] which Milgram did not. He chose people in cities: one in Boston, one in either Omaha or Wichita. And oh good grief man, they were respondents to advertisements for well-connected people.
(I see there's actually been quite a lot of related work. Haven't found ones in these particular directions though.)
Chain-lettering to myself here, Milgram had another experiment that kinda measures empathy toward a given group (or helpfulness, or sense of duty), the "lost letter" setup (PDF).
You could (IRB aside -- could you run this experiment if you can't debrief the subject?) do this where you drop the letters in different locations, and address them to different locations. You could racially code the recipient names like with experiments on resumes; the finder's race is harder to control outside of location. Income / class is hard.
(But are you measuring people's attitudes towards people, or people's habits towards paper mail?)
Here's a paper that looked at whether small-town folks are more helpful than city dwellers: nah, says the abstract. They varied the letter drop location, and held the destination address constant.
Can you identify behaviours or other externally-measurable/-visible things that fit your thesis? What about things that don't? Can you control for self-interest at all, i.e. whether society is getting better or worse for various small groups, various large groups, most people, and you? It seems like over-fitting is the biggest pitfall here, so using a methodology which works against that, or at least which makes you very aware that you probably are over-fitting, is probably just about the best you can do. Ideally, the Veil o' Ignorance™ can force you to consider factors which have nothing to do with your own interest, and actually quite apart from your own interest, but I would guess you're either already used to doing that, or perhaps have tried to align your own interests with universal good as you perceive it to a degree where that doesn't add anything
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In short, it is likely possible to resolve the dilemma, but I can't give you a specific answer.
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For example: Have people been brutal and antisocial in the same intensity as today, say, 20 years ago?
Summarize for yourself what is similar and where you find the differences. And where you find possible differences to today, how much of a meaning or change did they make to the bigger picture? Like, people back then still had some little sense of mercy while they seem to have lost it more and more until today. Or, the social status of people who did it wasn't like it is today. Among kids they remained outsiders 'cause no-one wanted to have these bullies around himself who beat up everyone just for fun. In society they didn't get the best positions, they became criminals and sooner or later ended in jail or a least with the bottle stuck to their mouths.
Yes, some way like that...
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The trend that worries me is social sorting -- I think our empathy for in-group is just fine, but empathy for out-group is the problem. And I'd hypothesize our empathy as a function of the social relation we stand in to somebody hasn't changed, but we stand in more distant and more negative social relations to more people ( ... )
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Has the mean number of hops changed over time? Has the distribution broadened? Run it with two people chosen uniformly from the whole population[1], versus pairs chosen to be same or different in, say, urban/rural location, race, class. Which social divide is the biggest one, and how have their sizes changed over time?
(I came for the historical data, but I'd stay for data today about distribution and size of social divides. How hard would this really be to run?)
Reply
[1] which Milgram did not. He chose people in cities: one in Boston, one in either Omaha or Wichita. And oh good grief man, they were respondents to advertisements for well-connected people.
(I see there's actually been quite a lot of related work. Haven't found ones in these particular directions though.)
Reply
You could (IRB aside -- could you run this experiment if you can't debrief the subject?) do this where you drop the letters in different locations, and address them to different locations. You could racially code the recipient names like with experiments on resumes; the finder's race is harder to control outside of location. Income / class is hard.
(But are you measuring people's attitudes towards people, or people's habits towards paper mail?)
Here's a paper that looked at whether small-town folks are more helpful than city dwellers: nah, says the abstract. They varied the letter drop location, and held the destination address constant.
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