This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Older, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

We asked people, how kind, honest, and good are people today, and then what about at various

points in the past 10 years ago, 20 years ago?

The year in which you were 20, the year in which you were born, and over and over again,

people tell us, people are less good today than they used to be.

They're less kind, they're less nice, less honest, they're less ethical, they're less

moral.

They feel like some switch has been flipped into society, something's gone wrong, and we

need to fix it, we need to turn things around.

But in this case, that negative trend that people perceive, it isn't there.

So whatever you would do to turn around isn't going to do anything, because it didn't

do anything in the first place.

It's like turning on the sprinkler system in a building that's not on fire.

You're just going to make everybody wet, and you're not going to help anything.

That's Adam Maestroiani.

He's a social psychologist who's fascinated by how many things people get wrong about

the people around him, like how most of us are so certain that people used to be much

kinder than they are now, or how most of us don't know how to end a conversation.

He's also found that being smarter doesn't make you happier.

And if all of that isn't interesting enough, he also happens to be a professional improviser.

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