Print culture is selective and cannot be interpreted as a straightforward reflection of culture in a broader sense ( 5). Reading this amount of text would take a single person millennia, but computational analyses of trends in relative word frequencies may hint at aspects of cultural change ( 2– 4). We address this gap by systematically analyzing word use in millions of books in English and Spanish covering the period from 1850 to 2019 ( 2). However, quantifying this intuitive notion remains difficult as systematic surveys of public sentiment and worldviews do not have a very long history. The post-truth era where “feelings trump facts” ( 1) may seem special when it comes to the historical balance between emotion and reasoning. All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion. Finally, we show that word trends in books parallel trends in corresponding Google search terms, supporting the idea that changes in book language do in part reflect changes in interest. Moreover, the pattern of change in the ratio between sentiment and rationality flag words since 1850 also occurs in New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed. However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as nonfiction. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/”we” and “he”/”they.” Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains challenging. We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data. The surge of post-truth political argumentation suggests that we are living in a special historical period when it comes to the balance between emotion and reasoning.
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