The Changing Psychology of Culture From 1800 Through 2000

“…Research has shown that socioeconomic development predicts various indicators of individualism, independence and autonomy, both contemporaneously across nations and historically within nations (Greenfield, 2013;Greenfield, Maynard, & Childs, 2003;Grossmann & Varnum, 2015;Hofstede, 2001;Inglehart & Baker, 2000;H. Park, Twenge, & Greenfield, 2014).…”

“…This is not the first paper to draw on the Google Books N-Gram Corpus. Since the seminal publication introducing this resource as well as the new concept of 'culturomics' [13], papers have been published that have analysed patterns of evolution of the usage of different words from a variety of perspectives, such as random fractal theory [14], Zipf's and Heaps' laws and their generalization to two-scaling regimes [15], the evolution of self-organization of word frequencies over time in written English [16], statistical properties of word growth [17,18], socio-historical determinants of word length dynamics [19]; and other studies have been more specifically aimed at issues such as the sociology of changing values resulting from urbanization [20] or changing concepts of happiness [21].…”

“…The initial studies carried out on this large database have allowed scholars to address unprecedented questions about language usage. In particular, for the first time it was possible to study quantitatively aspects of cultural change as reflected in language (Michel et al, 2011;Greenfield, 2013), and rigorously assess overall vocabulary drift over the time span of two centuries (Bochkarev et al, 2014). Moreover, methods inspired in statistical mechanics of complex systems were used to study the dynamics of word birth and death (Petersen et al, 2012a), long-range fractal correlations in word frequencies over centuries (Gao et al, 2012), and the scaling behaviour of word frequencies over time as represented by Zipf's (1949) and Heaps' (1978) laws (Petersen et al, 2012b;Gerlach and Altmann, 2013).…”