How have attempts at political persuasion changed over time? Using nine corpora dating back through 1789, containing over 7 million words of speech (1,666 documents in total), covering three different countries, plus the entire Google nGram corpus, we find that language relating to togetherness permanently crowded out language relating to duties and obligations in the persuasive speeches of politicians during the early 20th century. This shift is temporally predicted by a rise in Western nationalism and the mass movement of people from more rural to more urban areas and is unexplained by changes in language, private political speech, or nonmoral persuasion. We theorize that the emergence of the modern state in the 1920s had psychopolitical consequences for the ways that people understood and communicated their relationships with their government, which was then reflected in the levers of persuasion chosen by political elites.
BarrettH. C.BolyanatzA.CrittendenA. N.FesslerD. M.FitzpatrickS.GurvenM.. . . ScelzaB. A. (2016). Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(17), 4688–4693.
4.
BaumeisterR. F. (1987). How the self became a problem: A psychological review of historical research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(1), 163–176.
5.
BilligM. (1995). Banal nationalism. SAGE.
6.
BonikowskiB. (2016). Nationalism in settled times. Annual Review of Sociology, 42, 427–449.
ByrdR. (1994). The Senate, 1789-1989: Classic speeches, 1830-1993 (Vol. 3). U.S. Government Printing Office.
9.
Canes-WroneB. (2004). The public presidency, personal approval ratings, and policy making. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 34(3), 477–492.
10.
CavariA. (2013). The short-term effect of going public. Political Research Quarterly, 66(2), 336–351.
11.
ChiuC. Y.KwanL. Y. Y. (2016). Globalization and psychology. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 44–48.
12.
CliffordS.JeritJ. (2013). How words do the work of politics: Moral foundations theory and the debate over stem cell research. The Journal of Politics, 75(3), 659–671.
13.
d’AndradeR. G.StraussC. (1992). Human motives and cultural models. Cambridge University Press.
14.
DayM. V.FiskeS. T.DowningE. L.TrailT. E. (2014). Shifting liberal and conservative attitudes using moral foundations theory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(12), 1559–1573.
15.
DurkheimÉ. (1906). Determination of a moral fact. In DurkheimÉ. (Ed.), Sociology and philosophy (PocockD. F., Trans., 1974, pp. 35–62). The Free Press.
16.
EichlerM. (2007). Granger causality and path diagrams for multivariate time series. Journal of Econometrics, 137(2), 334–353.
FernándezR.FogliA.OlivettiC. (2004). Mothers and sons: Preference formation and female labor force dynamics. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119(4), 1249–1299.
19.
FourcadeM.HealyK. (2007). Moral views of market society. Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 285–311.
FrimerJ. A.BoghratiR.HaidtJ.GrahamJ.DehganiM. (2019). Moral foundations dictionary for linguistic analyses 2.0 [Unpublished manuscript]. https://osf.io/xakyw/
22.
GartenJ.BoghratiR.HooverJ.JohnsonK. M.DehghaniM. (2016, July). Morality between the lines: Detecting moral sentiment in text. In Proceedings of IJCAI 2016 workshop on computational modeling of attitudes (pp. 1–6). International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence.
23.
GelfandM. J.RaverJ. L.NishiiL.LeslieL. M.LunJ.LimB. C.. . . AycanZ. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study. Science, 332(6033), 1100–1104.
24.
GergenK. J. (1973). Social psychology as history. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26(2), 309–320.
25.
GrahamJ.HaidtJ.KolevaS.MotylM.IyerR.WojcikS. P.DittoP. (2013). Moral foundations theory. The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. In DevineP.PlantA. (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 47, pp. 55–130). Elsevier.
26.
GrahamJ.HaidtJ.NosekB. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1045.
27.
GrahamJ.MeindlP.BeallE.JohnsonK. M.ZhangL. (2016). Cultural differences in moral judgment and behavior, across and within societies. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 125–130.
28.
GreenfieldP. M. (2013). The changing psychology of culture from 1800 through 2000. Psychological Science, 24(9), 1722–1731.
29.
HaidtJ. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon.
30.
HaidtJ.GrahamJ.JosephC. (2009). Above and below left–right: Ideological narratives and moral foundations. Psychological Inquiry, 20(2–3), 110–119.
31.
HamamuraT. (2012). Are cultures becoming individualistic? A cross-temporal comparison of individualism–collectivism in the United States and Japan. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16(1), 3–24.
32.
HawkinsD. M. (2001). Fitting multiple change-point models to data. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 37(3), 323–341.
33.
HenrichJ.HeineS. J.NorenzayanA. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83.
34.
HirschmanA. O. (1982). Rival interpretations of market society: Civilizing, destructive, or feeble?Journal of Economic Literature, 20(4), 1463–1484.
35.
HitlinS.VaiseyS. (2013). The new sociology of morality. Annual Review of Sociology, 39, 51–68.
36.
HuL. T.BentlerP. M. (1998). Fit indices in covariance structure modeling: Sensitivity to underparameterized model misspecification. Psychological Methods, 3(4), 424–453.
37.
InglehartR. F.BakerW. E. (2000). Modernization, cultural change, and the persistence of traditional values. American Sociological Review, 65(1), 19–51.
38.
InglehartR. F.PonarinE.InglehartR. C. (2017). Cultural change, slow and fast: The distinctive trajectory of norms governing gender equality and sexual orientation. Social Forces, 95(4), 1313–1340.
39.
JamesN. A.MattesonD. S. (2014). ecp: An R package for nonparametric multiple change point analysis of multivariate data. Journal of Statistical Software, 62(7), 1–25.
40.
JenningsW.BevanS.JohnP. (2011). The agenda of British government: The Speech from the Throne, 1911–2008. Political Studies, 59(1), 74–98.
41.
KashimaY. (2000). Recovering Bartlett’s social psychology of cultural dynamics. European Journal of Social Psychology, 30, 383–404.
42.
KesebirP.KesebirS. (2012). The cultural salience of moral character and virtue declined in twentieth century America. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 7(6), 471–480.
43.
LamontM.ThévenotL. (2000). Introduction: Toward a renewed comparative cultural sociology. In LamontM.ThévenotL. (Eds.), Rethinking comparative cultural sociology. Repertoires of evaluation (pp. 1–24). Cambridge University Press.
44.
LimE. T. (2002). Five trends in presidential rhetoric: An analysis of rhetoric from George Washington to Bill Clinton. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 32(2), 328–348.
45.
LittD. (2017). Thanks Obama: My hopey-changey White House years. HarperCollins.
46.
LiuJ. H.RobinsonA. R. (2016). One ring to rule them all: Master discourses of enlightenment—and racism—from colonial to contemporary New Zealand. European Journal of Social Psychology, 46(2), 137–155.
47.
MarkusH. R.KitayamaS. (2010). Cultures and selves: A cycle of mutual constitution. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(4), 420–430.
48.
MattesonD. S.JamesN. A. (2014). A nonparametric approach for multiple change point analysis of multivariate data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 109(505), 334–345.
49.
McClellandD. C. (1961). The achieving society. Simon and Schuster.
50.
MerrittR. L. (1965). The emergence of American nationalism: A quantitative approach. American Quarterly, 17(2), 319–335.
51.
MichelJ. B.ShenY. K.AidenA. P.VeresA.GrayM. K.PickettJ. P.. . . PinkerS. (2011). Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science, 331(6014), 176–182.
52.
MilesM. R. (2016). Presidential appeals to moral foundations: How modern presidents persuade cross-ideologues. Policy Studies Journal, 44(4), 471–490.
53.
MilgramS. (1970). The experience of living in cities. Science, 167(3924), 1461–1468.
54.
OishiS.GrahamJ.KesebirS.GalinhaI. C. (2013). Concepts of happiness across time and cultures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(5), 559–577.
55.
PennebakerJ. W.BoothR. J.BoydR. L.FrancisM. E. (2015). Linguistic inquiry and word count: LIWC2015. Pennebaker Conglomerates. www.LIWC.net
RodgersD. T. (2012). Age of fracture. Belknap Press.
58.
RuleA.CointetJ. P.BearmanP. S. (2015). Lexical shifts, substantive changes, and continuity in State of the Union discourse, 1790–2014. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(35), 10837–10844.
59.
SagiE.DehghaniM. (2014). Measuring moral rhetoric in text. Social Science Computer Review, 32(2), 132–144.
60.
SayerA. (2005). The moral significance of class. Cambridge University Press.
61.
ShoganC. J.NealeT. H. (2009). The President’s State of the Union Address: Tradition, function, and policy implications. Congressional Research Service.
62.
ShwederR. A. (1982). Beyond self-constructed knowledge: The study of culture and morality. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 28(1), 41–69.
63.
SteenslandB. (2006). Cultural categories and the American welfare state: The case of guaranteed income policy. American Journal of Sociology, 111(5), 1273–1326.
64.
StrohmingerN.NicholsS. (2014). The essential moral self. Cognition, 131(1), 159–171.
65.
SvallforsS. (2006). The moral economy of class: Class and attitudes in comparative perspective. Stanford University Press.
66.
TalhelmT.ZhangX.OishiS.ShiminC.DuanD.LanX.KitayamaS. (2014). Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat agriculture. Science, 344(6184), 603–608.
67.
TedinK.RottinghausB.RodgersH. (2011). When the president goes public: The consequences of communication mode for opinion change across issue types and groups. Political Research Quarterly, 64(3), 506–519.
68.
TetenR. L. (2003). Evolution of the modern rhetorical presidency: Presidential presentation and development of the State of the Union address. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 33(2), 333–346.
69.
TwengeJ. M.CampbellW. K.GentileB. (2012). Increases in individualistic words and phrases in American books, 1960–2008. PLOS ONE, 7(7), Article e40181.
70.
Van LeeuwenF.ParkJ. H.KoenigB. L.GrahamJ. (2012). Regional variation in pathogen prevalence predicts endorsement of group-focused moral concerns. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33(5), 429–437.
71.
VarnumM. E.GrossmannI. (2017). Pathogen prevalence is associated with cultural changes in gender equality. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(1), Article 3.
72.
WestS. G.BiesanzJ. C.PittsS. C. (2000). Causal inference and generalization in field settings: Experimental and quasi-experimental designs. In ReisH. T.JuddC. M. (Eds.), Handbook of research methods in social and personality psychology (pp. 40–84). Cambridge University Press.
73.
WheelerM. A.McGrathM. J.HaslamN. (2019). Twentieth century morality: The rise and fall of moral concepts from 1900 to 2007. PLOS ONE, 14(2), Article e0212267.
74.
WildB.EichlerM.FriederichH. C.HartmannM.ZipfelS.HerzogW. (2010). A graphical vector autoregressive modelling approach to the analysis of electronic diary data. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 10(1), Article 28. http://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-10-28
YoungH. P. (2009). Innovation diffusion in heterogeneous populations: Contagion, social influence, and social learning. American Economic Review, 99(5), 1899–1924.
77.
ZengR.GreenfieldP. M. (2015). Cultural evolution over the last 40 years in China: Using the Google Ngram Viewer to study implications of social and political change for cultural values. International Journal of Psychology, 50(1), 47–55.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
