ArticlePloS one2019
Twentieth century morality: The rise and fall of moral concepts from 1900 to 2007.
Article in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- The seven virtues ofPNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Historical reconstruction of human moralization with word association and text corpora.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Stem cells researches and therapies towards endocrine diseases treatment; strategies, challenges, and opportunities.Journal of diabetes and metabolic disorders · 2024Review
- Evolution of the Moral Lexicon.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- A dialog on common morality in medical ethics in a pluralist setting in Iran: a qualitative content analysis.Journal of medical ethics and history of medicine · 2023Article
- Has Psychology Become More Positive? Trends in Language Use in Article Abstracts.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Concept Creep and Psychiatrization.Frontiers in sociology · 2021Review
- A Moral Theory of Public Service Motivation.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Development and validation of the Harm Concept Breadth Scale: Assessing individual differences in harm inflation.PloS one · 2020Article
- Freudian Slip? The Changing Cultural Fortunes of Psychoanalytic Concepts.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Trends in the cultural salience of morality across the 20th century in the Anglophone world, as reflected in changing use of moral language, were explored using the Google Books (English language) database. Relative frequencies of 304 moral terms, organized into six validated sets corresponding to general morality and the five moral domains proposed by moral foundations theory, were charted for the years 1900 to 2007. Each moral language set displayed unique, often nonlinear historical trajectories. Words conveying general morality (e.g., good, bad, moral, evil), and those representing Purity-based morality, implicating sanctity and contagion, declined steeply in frequency from 1900 to around 1980, when they rebounded sharply. Ingroup-based morality, emphasizing group loyalty, rose steadily over the 20th century. Harm-based morality, focused on suffering and care, rose sharply after 1980. Authority-based morality, which emphasizes respect for hierarchy and tradition, rose to a peak around the social convulsions of the late 1960s. There were no consistent tendencies for moral language to become more individualist or less grounded in concern for social order and cohesion. These differing time series suggest that the changing moral landscape of the 20th century can be divided into five distinct periods and illuminate the re-moralization and moral polarization of the last three decades.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.