J
joeNJ
Guest
Are we moving to a society where there is pressure to be “average”? It seems that the person that is “too nice” is portrayed as being out of touch or at best, naive. People stop dating these people just because they are “too nice”. On the positive side, the world in general seems to be doing a better job of identifying and condeming the truly evil acts. What worries me is the moving towards the middle of morality, where it’s fine to be “good enough”.
I write a blog about ethics and surviving in todays world. While researching my blog, I found a study of American Teenagers in 2008 by the non-profit Josephson Institute. In the study, almost 30,000 teenagers were asked a variety of questions regarding lying, cheating and stealing behaviors.
Here are the results,
30% admitted to stealing from a store in the past year (35% boys/26% girls)
83% admitted to lying to their parents about something significant
64% admitted to cheating on a test
But apparently, the teenagers did not feel these were very serious dishonest acts as 93% of the students felt they were satisfied with their character and 77% felt they were better at doing the right thing than most people.
This concerns me greatly as I try and raise my daughter in a world where liars and cheaters think that lying and cheating aren’t bad enough to diminish their character.
What influences do you think is causing this migration of our moral standard? Is it too little parental involvment (which I’m inclined to think it is), too much TV/video games leading to an egocentric society, pop culture which bashes authority (church, parents, leaders, etc) or is it something else.
I write a blog about ethics and surviving in todays world. While researching my blog, I found a study of American Teenagers in 2008 by the non-profit Josephson Institute. In the study, almost 30,000 teenagers were asked a variety of questions regarding lying, cheating and stealing behaviors.
Here are the results,
30% admitted to stealing from a store in the past year (35% boys/26% girls)
83% admitted to lying to their parents about something significant
64% admitted to cheating on a test
But apparently, the teenagers did not feel these were very serious dishonest acts as 93% of the students felt they were satisfied with their character and 77% felt they were better at doing the right thing than most people.
This concerns me greatly as I try and raise my daughter in a world where liars and cheaters think that lying and cheating aren’t bad enough to diminish their character.
What influences do you think is causing this migration of our moral standard? Is it too little parental involvment (which I’m inclined to think it is), too much TV/video games leading to an egocentric society, pop culture which bashes authority (church, parents, leaders, etc) or is it something else.