The top panel shows trends in the use of words related to rationality. Credit: Marten Scheffer.
Scientists from Wageningen University and Research and Indiana University have discovered that the increasing irrelevance of factual truth in public discourse is part of a groundswell trend that started decades ago.
The study shows that over the past forty years, public interest has shifted from rationality to emotion.
From ratio to sentiment.
The researchers found that the words associated with reasoning, such as "determine" and "conclusion", rose in the 1850s while words related to human experience, such as "feel" and "believe", fell. Over the past 40 years, the pattern has changed as a result of a shift from a collectivistic to an individualism.
The co-author of the book says that it's difficult to understand the sea- change in book language. The reversal occurs in fiction and non-fiction. The pattern of change between sentiment and rationality flag words in New York Times articles is similar to what we found in the book corpora.
There are causes.
The drivers of long-term patterns seen from 1850 until 1980 are not speculative, says lead author Marten Scheffer. The rise in status of the scientific approach may have been caused by the rapid developments in science and technology, which helped to drive the socio-economic benefits. Max Weber believed that this may have led to a process of 'disenchantment' as the role of spiritualism dwindled in modernized, bureaucratic, and secularized societies.
It's difficult to say what caused the reversal of the long-term trend around 1980. There could be a connection to tensions arising from changes in economic policies since the early 1980s, which may have been defended on rational arguments but the benefits of which were not equally distributed.
Social media.
The authors found that the shift from rationality to sentiment in book language was accelerated by the rise of social media, and that it was paralleled by the shift from collectivistic to individualism.
The post-truth phenomenon is linked to a historical seesaw in the balance between our two fundamental modes of thinking, according to the co-author. It is possible that it is impossible to reverse the sea change we signal. Society may need to find a new balance, explicitly recognizing the importance of intuition and emotion, while at the same time making best use of the much needed power of rationality and science to deal with topics in their full complexity.
The rise and fall of rationality in language is a paper by Marten Scheffer and colleagues. There is a book titled "10.1073/pnas.2107848118".
The National Academy of Sciences has a journal.
'We conclude' or 'I believe?' A study found rationality declined decades ago.
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