ArticleNature human behaviour2025
Computational analysis of US congressional speeches reveals a shift from evidence to intuition.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 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
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Why do Public Debates Escalate? Trigger Points and the Moral Dynamics of "Hot Politics".The British journal of sociology · 2026Article
- Tolerance for democratic norm violations increases when sincerity replaces accuracy as a marker of honesty.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Computational analysis of US congressional speeches reveals a shift from evidence to intuition.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Pursuit of honest and truthful decision-making is crucial for governance and accountability in democracies. However, people sometimes take different perspectives of what it means to be honest and how to pursue truthfulness. Here we explore a continuum of perspectives from evidence-based reasoning, rooted in ascertainable facts and data, at one end, to intuitive decisions that are driven by feelings and subjective interpretations, at the other. We analyse the linguistic traces of those contrasting perspectives in congressional speeches from 1879 to 2022. We find that evidence-based language has continued to decline since the mid-1970s, together with a decline in legislative productivity. The decline was accompanied by increasing partisan polarization in Congress and rising income inequality in society. The results highlight the importance of evidence-based language in political decision-making.
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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.