ArticlePloS one2026
Are societies becoming more self-centric? Evidence from five decades of popular music spanning three continents.
Article in PloS one, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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9 authors.
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Abstract
A commonly expressed claim is that societal self-centrism has increased over recent decades. To examine this assertion, we analyzed an influential cultural product - popular music - to track changes in self-focus across five decades and three continents. Using an established linguistic analysis technique, personal pronoun usage (i.e., a marker of self-focus) was quantified in the ten most popular songs each year from 1970 to 2019 in the United States, Germany, Japan, and Hong Kong. Results indicated a significant increase in self-focused language over time in individualistic societies (i.e., United States & Germany), whereas no comparable trend was observed in more collectivistic contexts (i.e., Japan & Hong Kong). These findings demonstrate how public artifacts can be leveraged to investigate cultural variation in the expression of self-centrism.
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