ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
The rise of prosociality in fiction preceded democratic revolutions in Early Modern Europe.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Societal crises disrupt long-term increases in stress, negativity, and simplicity in US Billboard song lyrics from 1973 to 2023.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The chronospatial revolution in psychology.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Citizens in democratic countries have more benevolent traits, fewer malevolent traits, and greater well-being.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Quantifying and explaining the rise of fiction.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Reproductive Strategies and Romantic Love in Early Modern Europe.Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Cross-border political competition.PloS one · 2024Article
- A step-by-step method for cultural annotation by LLMs.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2024Article
- Using portraits to quantify the changes of generalized social trust in European history: A replication study.PloS one · 2023Article
- Quantifying the scientific revolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- The cultural evolution of love in literary history.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- How to Develop Reliable Instruments to Measure the Cultural Evolution of Preferences and Feelings in History?Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history.PloS one · 2022Article
- Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
The English and French Revolutions represent a turning point in history, marking the beginning of the modern rise of democracy. Recent advances in cultural evolution have put forward the idea that the early modern revolutions may be the product of a long-term psychological shift, from hierarchical and dominance-based interactions to democratic and trust-based relationships. In this study, we tested this hypothesis by analyzing theater plays during the early modern period in England and France. We found an increase in cooperation-related words over time relative to dominance-related words in both countries. Furthermore, we found that the accelerated rise of cooperation-related words preceded both the English Civil War (1642) and the French Revolution (1789). Finally, we found that rising per capita gross domestic product (GDPpc) generally led to an increase in cooperation-related words. These results highlight the likely role of long-term psychological and economic changes in explaining the rise of early modern democracies.
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