In this paper, we perform a text analysis of Adam Smith’s two books, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, to better characterize their highly disputed differences in terms of moral cognition. In particular, given that Smith’s …
Within the conceptual framework of the Tightness-Looseness paradigm, we study the dynamics of the social salience of self-control (tight) vs-self-indulgence (loose) orientations across the 20th century on the basis of the English Google Books corpus, …
Assessing the impact of conservation campaigns is of high importance for optimizing the use of limited resources. Lists of threatened species are often used as media outreach tools, but their usefulness is rarely tested. We investigated whether the …
Popular music offers a rich source of data that provides insights into long-term cultural evolutionary dynamics. One major trend in popular music, as well as other cultural products such as literary fiction, is an increase over time in negatively …
What is fiction about, and what is it good for? An influential family of theories sees fiction as rooted in adaptive simulation mechanisms. In this view, our propensity to create and enjoy narrative fictions was selected and maintained due to the …
Here, we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency and vocabulary at the corpus scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies from three centuries of English lan- guage books. Against these data, we test both static and …
The presence of emotional words and content in stories has been shown to enhance a story’s memorability, and its cultural success. Yet, recent cultural trends run in the opposite direction. Using the Google Books corpus, coupled with two …
For the 20th century since the Depression, we find a strong correlation between a ‘literary misery index’ derived from English language books and a moving average of the previous decade of the annual U.S. economic misery index, which is the sum of …
In this paper, we test the robustness of emotion extraction from English language books published in the 20th century. Our analysis is performed on a sample of the 8 million digitized books available in the Google Books Ngram corpus by applying three …
We report here trends in the usage of “mood” words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the …