Scientists from Wageningen University and Research (WUR) and Indiana University found that the growing irrelevance of factual truth in public discourse is part of a growing trend that began decades ago.
While the current “post-truth era” has taken many by surprise, the study shows that over the past forty years public interest has undergone an accelerated shift from the collective to the individual, and from rationality to emotion.
From reason to feeling
By analyzing the language of millions of books , researchers found that words associated with reasoning, such as "determine" and "conclusion," have increased systematically since 1850, while words related to human experience, such as "feel" and " believe", decreased. This pattern has reversed over the past 40 years in parallel with a shift from a collectivist to an individualistic approach , as reflected by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as ’I’/’we’.
“Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains a challenge,” says co-author Johan Bollen of Indiana University. “However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in both fiction and nonfiction . Furthermore, we observed the same pattern of change between sentiment and rationality indicator words in the New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artifact of the corpus of books we analyzed.”
Causes
"Inferring drivers of long-term patterns seen from 1850 to 1980 necessarily remains speculative." Says lead author Marten Scheffer from WUR. “One possibility when it comes to trends from 1850 to 1980 is that rapid developments in science and technology and their socioeconomic benefits drove an increase in the status of the scientific approach, which gradually permeated culture, society and its institutions ranging from education to politics. As Max Weber argued early on, this may have led to a process of “disenchantment” as the role of spiritualism diminished in modernized, bureaucratic, and secularized societies.”
What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pin down. However, according to the authors, there could be a connection with tensions arising from changes in economic policies since the early 1980s, which may have been defended with rational arguments but whose benefits were not distributed equally.
Social networks
The authors found that the shift from rationality to sentiment in book language accelerated around 2007 with the rise of social media , when across languages the frequency of fact-related words decreased while fact-laden language increased. emotions, a trend parallel to a change of collectivist. to individualistic language .
Co-author Ingrid van de Leemput of WUR: “Whatever the drivers, our results suggest that the post-truth phenomenon is linked to a historical seesaw in the balance between our two fundamental modes of thinking: reasoning versus intuition. If true, it may well be impossible to reverse the radical change we point out.
Instead, societies may need to find a new balance, explicitly recognizing the importance of intuition and emotion, while at the same time making the best use of the much-needed power of rationality and science to address issues in all their complexity. ”.
Meaning The post-truth era has taken many by surprise. Here, we use a massive analysis of language to demonstrate that the rise of fact-free argumentation can perhaps be understood as part of a deeper shift. After 1850, the use of emotion-laden words in Google Books systematically decreased, while the use of words associated with factual argumentation steadily increased. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words decreased while emotionally charged language increased, a trend parallel to a collectivist language shift. to individualist. |
