ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
The rise and fall of rationality in language.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- White Americans' preference for Black people in advertising has increased in the past 66 y: A meta-analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Pooled it
- The Rhetoric of Disenchantment: Ghost Belief and Secular Critique in Early Twentieth-Century China.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Cognitive distortions are associated with increasing political polarization.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Pathogen stress heightens sensorimotor dimensions in the human collective semantic space.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Words Matter: Reflective Science Communication and Tradeoffs in Environmental Health Research.Environmental health perspectives · 2024Article
- GPT is an effective tool for multilingual psychological text analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- How Male and Female Literary Authors Write About Affect Across Cultures and Over Historical Periods.Affective science · 2023Article
- Colloquialization as a key factor in historical changes of rational and emotional words.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Reply to Sun: Making sense of language change.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Using big data to track major shifts in human cognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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4 authors.
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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
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