一项分析1800年至2000年间超过150万本美国和英国书籍的研究发现，随着时间的推移，文化和价值观发生了变化。研究指出，使用诸如“choose”和“get”的词汇增加，而“obliged”和“give”等词汇减少，表明现代社会的人们更加关注自己的感受。心理学家Patricia Greenfield的研究表明，这种语言的变化反映了社会从农村、低技术转变为城市、高技术社会的过程中，个人主义心理功能的发展。该研究显示，目前讨论的个人主义上升并非新现象，而是自我们从主要农业社会过渡到主要城市、高科技社会以来持续了两个世纪的过程。
The shifts in language would indicate how US and British society has grown more selfish as it has grown wealthier
Analysis of words used in more than 1.5 million American and British books published between 1800 and 2000 has revealed how cultural values have changed in that time.
Researchers found an increase in the use of words like “choose” and “get” in the past two centuries while words like “obliged” and “give” decreased.
There was also an indication that people in modern society are more in touch with their emotions than they once were – the use of “feel” increased while “act” decreased.
The psychologists behind the study claim the shifts in language indicate how US and British society has grown more selfish as it has grown wealthier and more urban.
Professor Patricia Greenfield, a psychologist at the University of California Los Angeles who conducted the study, said: "This research shows that there has been a two century long historical shift toward individualistic psychological functioning.
"The currently discussed rise in individualism is not something recent but has been going on for centuries as we moved from a predominantly rural, low-tech society to a predominantly urban, high-tech society."
Professor Greenfield, whose work is published in the journal Psychological Science, used Google’s Ngram Viewer to count word frequencies in 1,160,000 books by US authors.
The software allows users to rapidly count the numbers of words in books.
These included novels, non-fiction titles and textbooks.
She then did the same with 350,000 books published in the UK before repeating the tests with synonyms for each target word.
“These replications indicate that the underlying concepts, not just word frequency, have been changing in importance over historical time,” said Professor Greenfield.
She found words that indicate a growing focus on the self, such as “child”, “unique”, “individual”, and “self”, all increased in use.
The use of words like “get” declined between 1940 and the 1960s before rising in the 1970s, perhaps reflected that cooperative feel and lower levels of self-interest during World War II and post war declined.
The importance of religion, obedience and social relationships also seemed to decline over the 200 year period, with words like "authority," "belong" and "pray” becoming less common.
Professor Greenfield is now hoping to replicate the work with books in Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese to look for global patterns in culture shift reflected in literature.
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