Cultural products such as song lyrics, television shows, and books reveal cultural differences, including cultural change over time. Two studies examine changes in the use of individualistic words (Study 1) and phrases (Study 2) in the Google Books Ngram corpus of millions of books in American English. Current samples from the general population generated and rated lists of individualistic words and phrases (e.g., “unique,” “personalize,” “self,” “all about me,” “I am special,” “I’m the best”). Individualistic words and phrases increased in use between 1960 and 2008, even when controlling for changes in communal words and phrases. Language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960.

Introduction

Just as culture differs across regions, culture changes over time. Trends may appear among individuals in the form of generational change, with each cohort influenced most by the sociocultural environment during their childhood and adolescence (e.g., [1], [2]). Numerous studies have documented generational differences in personality traits, values, and attitudes (e.g., [3]–[7]; for a review, see [8]), with especially consistent increases in individualistic traits such as narcissism, surgency, and positive self-views [9]–[12]. However, there is still debate about whether generational changes exist at all, including in individualism (e.g., [13]).

In addition, cultural change is not limited to the psyches of individuals, and few studies have investigated change in cultural products such as TV shows, song lyrics, and books [14]–[17]. Authors have often documented cultural change using media sources as examples (e.g., [8], [18], [19]), but few of these observations have been verified by empirical data. These trends in cultural products are important because culture includes assumptions and patterns shared by members [20]. Lamoreaux and Morling argue that it is important to study cultural products for at least three reasons [15]. First, culture includes the context as well as the person, and cultural products capture culture “outside the head.” Second, cultural products are not subject to the biases of that potentially plague self-report measures such as social desirability and reference group effects. Third, and perhaps most important, cultural products shape individuals’ ideas of cultural norms and “common sense.” Individuals’ behavior is often influenced by their beliefs about what others in their culture believe and do, even if these assumptions are erroneous (e.g., [21]). Cultural products such as song lyrics, TV shows, and books are likely among the most common sources for perceptions of cultural norms.

Until recently, it was extremely labor-intensive to unearth cultural change through cultural products. However, new technologies such as word coding computer programs (for a review, see [22]) have made it possible to analyze language use in cultural products such as song lyrics [23]. Even then, such studies are very limited in the number of products they can analyze; for example, the song lyrics study examined only the 10 most popular songs for each year between 1980 and 2008. Fortunately, more powerful technology has now made it possible to analyze language use over time in very large numbers of books, another cultural product. The Google Books Ngram Viewer allows users to search a corpus of 5 million books for words and phrases up to 5 words long [24]. The corpus is so large that it would take 80 years for someone to read all of the books for the year 2000 alone [24].

Language use in books could reflect cultural change in at least three ways. First, language use reflects the viewpoints of book authors, showing change in the values and attitudes of an influential portion of the population. Second, books may mirror a market-driven assessment of what people want to read, capturing changes in the preferences of the population of Americans who read books. Third, language use in books may be a microcosm of the language use of people living in that time. For example, a fiction writer may aim to capture realistic modern dialogue. Thus language use in books captures cultural change from the individual level (the author) to the group level (trends in market-based appeal and in language use among the population).

In the current study, we examine language use in American books in English in the modern period (1960–2008; 2008 is the latest data available in Google Books). We chose 1960 as a starting point because many authors have noted that the pace of cultural change in the U.S., particularly in individualism, accelerated beginning in the late 1960s through the 1970s [25]–[28]. Individualistic cultural systems emphasize the rights and importance of the individual self, in contrast to communal cultural systems that emphasize the importance of the group (e.g., [29]). Given past research finding increases in individualism in the U.S., we predicted that the use of individualistic words and phrases would increase. We conducted two studies using the extensive Google Books Ngram database.

We then faced the decision of what language to analyze. That is, which individualistic words (Study 1) and phrases (Study 2) should we examine? We could have generated lists of words and phrases ourselves or asked a selected panel of experts. However, the former approach had the potential for bias given awareness of the research hypotheses, and the second approach is problematic because there is no clear “panel of experts” on this issue, and the selection of such experts would thus be open to bias. Thus we relied on a more objective method, asking a general sample of adults from the website Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to generate and rate individualistic words and phrases. A sample from the general population also has the possible advantage of better reflecting the views of the average member of the culture than would a group of experts or a group of college students.

Although more objective than a researcher-generated list, a list generated by a current sample still has the limitation of being situated in a particular time. Words and phrases popular at the current moment will be more likely to come to participants’ minds than words and phrases used in the past. This might be best conceptualized as a historical “recency effect.” For example, a particular individualistic phrase (e.g., “all about me”) might show an increase as a result of increasing individualism, but also as a result of accessibility if it is used more often now than it was in the past.

To deal with this potential issue, the sample also generated and rated communal words and phrases as a control. We predict that the individualistic language generated and rated by these modern samples will increase. However, we also predict that individualistic words and phrases will increase even when communal words and phrases are allowed to compete to predict year in a regression equation. With the inclusion of communal words and phrases also generated and rated by a current sample, this method provides a more conservative test of whether individualistic language has increased in American books than simply looking at change in individualistic words and phrases.