Scientists confirm the demise of rationalityhttps://t.co/woGhW2mpkQ
— Sabine Hossenfelder (@skdh) December 28, 2021
Significance of the linked article, The rise and fall of rationality in language:
The post-truth era has taken many by surprise. Here, we use massive language analysis to demonstrate that the rise of fact-free argumentation may perhaps be understood as part of a deeper change. After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.
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.
The post-truth era where “feelings trump facts” (1) may seem special when it comes to the historical balance between emotion and reasoning. However, quantifying this intuitive notion remains difficult as systematic surveys of public sentiment and worldviews do not have a very long history. We address this gap by systematically analyzing word use in millions of books in English and Spanish covering the period from 1850 to 2019 (2). Reading this amount of text would take a single person millennia, but computational analyses of trends in relative word frequencies may hint at aspects of cultural change (2⇓–4). Print culture is selective and cannot be interpreted as a straightforward reflection of culture in a broader sense (5). Also, the popularity of particular words and phrases in a language can change for many reasons including technological context (e.g., carriage or computer), and the meaning of some words can change profoundly over time (e.g., gay) (6). Nonetheless, across large amounts of words, patterns of change in frequencies may to some degree reflect changes in the way people feel and see the world (2⇓–4), assuming that concepts that are more abundantly referred to in books in part represent concepts that readers at that time were more interested in. Here, we systematically analyze long-term dynamics in the frequency of the 5,000 most used words in English and Spanish (7) in search of indicators of changing world views. We also analyze patterns in fiction and nonfiction separately. Moreover, we compare patterns for selected key words in other languages to gauge the robustness and generalizability of our results. To see if results might be specific to the corpora of book language we used, we analyzed how word use changed in the New York Times since 1850. In addition, to probe whether changes in the frequency of words used in books does indeed reflect interest in the corresponding concepts we analyzed how change in Google word searches relates to the recent change in words used in books. Following best-practice guidelines (8) we standardized word frequencies by dividing them by the frequency of the word “an,” which is indicative of total text volume, and subsequently taking z-scores (SI Appendix, sections 1, 5, and 8).
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