Twentieth century morality: The rise and fall of moral concepts from 1900 to 2007

Abstract

Trends in the cultural salience of morality across the 20 th century in the Anglophone world, as reflected in changing use of moral language, were explored using the Google Books (English language) database. Relative frequencies of 304 moral terms, organized into six validated sets corresponding to general morality and the five moral domains proposed by moral foundations theory, were charted for the years 1900 to 2007. Each moral language set displayed unique, often nonlinear historical trajectories. Words conveying general morality (e.g., good, bad, moral, evil), and those representing Purity-based morality, implicating sanctity and contagion, declined steeply in frequency from 1900 to around 1980, when they rebounded sharply. Ingroup-based morality, emphasizing group loyalty, rose steadily over the 20 th century. Harm-based morality, focused on suffering and care, rose sharply after 1980. Authority-based morality, which emphasizes respect for hierarchy and tradition, rose to a peak around the social convulsions of the late 1960s. There were no consistent tendencies for moral language to become more individualist or less grounded in concern for social order and cohesion. These differing time series suggest that the changing moral landscape of the 20 th century can be divided into five distinct periods and illuminate the re-moralization and moral polarization of the last three decades.

Social transmission favours the ‘morally good’ over the ‘merely arousing’

“…It is particularly supported by van Leeuwen et al (2018), who found that participants more frequently chose to transmit positive, low-arousal vignettes over negative, high arousal ones when transmission was to strangers, suggesting that seeking social connection might influence transmission preferences. Further, unlike the negativity bias found in trends in emotional expression in art (see Brand et al, 2019;Morin and Acerbi, 2017), examination of trends in the cultural salience of moral terms shows no clear, linear trend (Wheeler et al, 2019), suggesting that the transmission of moral information may be particularly dependant on contextual factors. Further research is required to examine fully the role of arousal, memory, communicative intent and audience perception in the transmission of moral content.…”

Development and validation of the Harm Concept Breadth Scale: Assessing individual differences in harm inflation

“…Haslam's claim that concept creep may be driven by a rising cultural concern with harm is supported by a recent examination of the relative frequency of harm-related words in the Google Books database. This analysis found that these words have risen steeply in salience since 1980 [7].…”

Freudian Slip? The Changing Cultural Fortunes of Psychoanalytic Concepts

“…They generated unsmoothed time series of the relative frequencies of each term for the 1900–2008 periods. As in Wheeler et al (2019), these time series were rescaled so that the year with the highest relative frequency was scaled as 100 and all other years were represented as percentages of that peak frequency. To test whether any terms were not sufficiently distinctive to the psychoanalytic tradition, we excluded terms whose mean scaled frequency from 1900–1909 was greater than 10 (i.e., they were widely used, reaching >10% of their eventual peak frequency, before psychoanalysis became prominent).…”

“…Using the Google Books corpus, which contains 500 billion words from 5 million digitized books, for instance, changes in the relative frequency of words (as a function of all words) can be examined as an index of their cultural salience. Researchers have used culturomic methods to explore shifts in individualist and collectivist values (Twenge et al, 2012; Hamamura and Xu, 2015; Zeng and Greenfield, 2015), concepts of happiness (Oishi et al, 2013), and concepts of morality (Wheeler et al, 2019), among others.…”