Even More Corroboration of A Trend

With the ongoing decline of empathy, and associated mutual concern and cooperation, word choice frequency has clearly shifted inward

Neat little paper here employs the Google nGram analytical tool to demonstrate that concerns of the ‘inner world’ of feeling now very clearly dominate the ‘outer world’ of shared rationality. As other data indicate, this long slide into the sticky (and stinky) mud of myopic minds began (Figure 2, paper) by the late 1950s-early 1960s. Abstract:

The surge of post-truth political argumentation suggests that we are living in a special historical period when it comes to the balance between emotion and reasoning. To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data. We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/”we” and “he”/”they.” Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains challenging. However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as nonfiction. Moreover, the pattern of change in the ratio between sentiment and rationality flag words since 1850 also occurs in New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed. Finally, we show that word trends in books parallel trends in corresponding Google search terms, supporting the idea that changes in book language do in part reflect changes in interest. All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.

How do you/we feel/think about this?

And, if you want a reminder of what this sort of navel-gazing can lead to, check out Rudolph Rigger’s post here.

From https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118