Ⅱ期（一般・学内）
令和 6 年度
武蔵野大学大学院 人間社会研究科 人間学専攻 人間行動学コース 入学試験問題（12 月 17 日）［ 英語 ］次の英文を読んで各問に答えなさい。
People believe that morality is declining. Is it? Societies keep (or at least leave) reasonably goodrecords of extremely immoral behaviour such as slaughter and conquest, slavery and subjugation ormurder and rape, and (1) careful analyses of those historical records strongly suggest that theseobjective indicators of immorality have decreased significantly over the last few centuries. On average,
modern humans treat each other far better than their forebears ever did—which is not what one
would expect if honesty, kindness, niceness and goodness had been decreasing steadily, year after year,
for millennia. (2) Although there are no similarly objective historical records of everyday morality—of how often people offer their seats to an elderly person, give directions to a lost tourist or help theirneighbour fix a fence—there are subjective measures of such things.
Recall that in study 1, we examined people’s reports of moral change, which were obtained whensurvey researchers asked people to mentally compare the morality of people in the present to themorality of people at some point in the past and then report the direction of the difference. But, fordecades, survey researchers have also been asking people to report directly on the moral values, traits
and behaviours of themselves and their contemporaries in the present: “Were you treated with respect
all day yesterday?” or “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they aremostly just looking out for themselves?” or “During the past 12 months, how often have you carrieda stranger’s belongings, like groceries, a suitcase, or shopping bag?”. (3) If, as people all over the world
claim, morality has been declining steadily and precipitously for decades, then people’s reports ofcurrent morality should also have declined over the years. Have they?
（中略）The results of studies 1–3 suggest that people believe that morality has declined, and the results ofstudy 4 suggest that this belief is illusory. (4) If morality has not declined, then why do people thinkit has? Although there are surely many good answers to this question, we suggest that one of themhas to do with the fact that when two well-established psychological phenomena work in tandem,
they can produce an illusion of moral decline. First, numerous studies have shown that human beingsare especially likely to seek and attend to negative information about others, and mass media indulge
this tendency with a disproportionate focus on people behaving badly. As such, people may encountermore negative information than positive information about the morality of ‘people in general’, andthis ‘biased exposure effect’ may help explain why people believe that current morality is relatively
low. Second, numerous studies have shown that when people recall positive and negative events fromthe past, the negative events are more likely to be forgotten, more likely to be misremembered as
their opposite and more likely to have lost their emotional impact. This ‘biased memory effect’ mayhelp explain why people believe that past morality was relatively high. Working together, these two
phenomena can produce an illusion of moral decline. (5) Specifically, biased exposure to information
about current morality may make the present seem like a moral wasteland, biased memory for
information about past morality may make the past seem like a moral wonderland and when people
in a wasteland remember being in a wonderland, they may naturally conclude that the landscape haschanged.
出典：Mastroianni, A. M., & Gilbert, D. T. (2023). The illusion of moral decline. Nature, 618(7966),782–789.
語彙：slaughter 虐殺, subjugation 征服, precipitously 急激に, disproportionate 不相応な,wasteland 荒野、荒れ地
問１． 下線部(1)を和訳しなさい。
問２． 下線部(2)を和訳しなさい。
問３． 下線部(3)を和訳しなさい。
問４． 下線部(4)を和訳しなさい。
問５． 下線部(5)を和訳しなさい。
問６． この文章の大意を日本語で記述しなさい。文字数は 200 字程度とすること。

以上