Cultural revolution
Jean Twenge & Tim Kasser
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, July 2013, Pages 883-897
Abstract:
We examined whether culture-level indices of threat, instability, and materialistic modeling were linked to the materialistic values of American 12th graders between 1976 and 2007 (N = 355,296). Youth materialism (such as the importance of money and of owning expensive material items) increased over the generations, peaking in the late 1980s to early 1990s with Generation X and then staying at historically high levels for Millennials (GenMe). Societal instability and disconnection (e.g., unemployment, divorce) and social modeling (e.g., advertising spending) had both contemporaneous and lagged associations with higher levels of materialism, with advertising most influential during adolescence and instability during childhood. Societal-level living standards during childhood predicted materialism 10 years later. When materialistic values increased, work centrality steadily declined, suggesting a growing discrepancy between the desire for material rewards and the willingness to do the work usually required to earn them.
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Changes in Pronoun Use in American Books and the Rise of Individualism, 1960-2008
Jean Twenge, Keith Campbell & Brittany Gentile
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, April 2013, Pages 406-415
Abstract:
Change over time in culture can appear among individuals and in cultural products such as song lyrics, television, and books. This analysis examines changes in pronoun use in the Google Books ngram database of 766,513 American books published 1960-2008. We hypothesize that pronoun use will reflect increasing individualism and decreasing collectivism in American culture. Consistent with this hypothesis, the use of first person plural pronouns (e.g., we, us) decreased 10% first person singular pronouns (I, me) increased 42%, and second person pronouns (you, your) quadrupled. These results complement previous research finding increases in individualistic traits among Americans.
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Are today's Millennials splintering into a new generational cohort? Maybe!
Kathleen Debevec et al.
Journal of Consumer Behaviour, January/February 2013, Pages 20-31
Abstract:
A new generational cohort is emerging from the Millennial market segment as a result of cataclysmic events that have occurred since 2008. Interviews with college upperclassmen in the United States identified significant events influencing their values, the values arising from these events, and new values not associated with older Millennials. The most important events identified included the Great Recession, 9/11, and the election of the first African-American president. Values of Millennials were assessed in online surveys of college juniors and seniors in the United States in the fall of 2009 and 2010 and among older Millennials, aged 27-31, during the summer of 2010. The values most strongly differentiating the younger and older Millennials were "piety" and "thrift." Younger Millennials in the United States are less thrifty and more secular and sexually permissive than older Millennials. They are also less patriotic and less concerned about politics, sustainability, saving, and making mistakes in life. This suggests a splintering of the Millennials cohort as a result of the Great Recession and the potential emergence of a younger "entitlement" cohort. It also suggests further investigation of cross-national value shifts among younger Millennials, prompted by the Great Recession.
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Concepts of Happiness Across Time and Cultures
Shigehiro Oishi et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, May 2013, Pages 559-577
Abstract:
We explored cultural and historical variations in concepts of happiness. First, we analyzed the definitions of happiness in dictionaries from 30 nations to understand cultural similarities and differences in happiness concepts. Second, we analyzed the definition of happiness in Webster's dictionaries from 1850 to the present day to understand historical changes in American English. Third, we coded the State of the Union addresses given by U.S. presidents from 1790 to 2010. Finally, we investigated the appearance of the phrases happy nation versus happy person in Google's Ngram Viewer from 1800 to 2008. Across cultures and time, happiness was most frequently defined as good luck and favorable external conditions. However, in American English, this definition was replaced by definitions focused on favorable internal feeling states. Our findings highlight the value of a historical perspective in the study of psychological concepts.
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Positive and negative content in commercials airing on nine television channels
Lourdes Dale et al.
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, July 2013, Pages 134-149
Abstract:
We examined the content of commercials airing on 9 general TV channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox, WB, CNN, MTV, and ESPN) and investigated whether channel, time of day, and program rating were predictors of the rates of positive and negative content. The rate of negative content for the 9,571 commercials airing on the general channels (13.7%) was significantly less than the rate of positive content (20.2%) and not unlike the rate of negative content for the 2,433 commercials airing on 3 children's channels (Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon; 14.8%). Commercials airing on the general channels included significantly more positive content than commercials airing on the children's channels (15.7%). Commercials airing on ABC and NBC and during TV-Y programs were more likely to include positive content and less likely to include negative content, whereas commercials airing on MTV and during TV-14 programs were more likely to include negative content. Overall, time of day was not a significant predictor of the content of the commercials, and only the L label was suggestive of negative content in commercials. Clinicians should educate parents about the negative content in commercials and advocate for greater parity between the televised programs and the corresponding commercials.
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A negative Flynn effect in Finland, 1997-2009
Edward Dutton & Richard Lynn
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
The average IQs of approximately 25,000 18-20 year old male military conscripts in Finland per year are reported for the years 1988 to 2009. The results showed increases in the scores on tests of Shapes, Number and Words over the years 1988 to 1997 averaging 4.0 IQ points a decade. From 1997 to 2009 there were declines in all three tests averaging 2.0 IQ points a decade.
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The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books
Alberto Acerbi et al.
PLoS ONE, March 2013
Abstract:
We report here trends in the usage of "mood" words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive and negative moods, underlain by a general decrease in the use of emotion-related words through time. Finally, we show that, in books, American English has become decidedly more "emotional" than British English in the last half-century, as a part of a more general increase of the stylistic divergence between the two variants of English language.
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Children's Advertising Exposure, Advertised Product Desire, and Materialism: A Longitudinal Study
Suzanna Opree et al.
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous studies have suggested that advertising exposure affects materialism among youth. However, this causal effect has not been investigated among children in middle childhood, who are in the midst of consumer development. Furthermore, the mechanism underlying this relation has not been studied. To fill these lacunae, this study focused on the longitudinal relation between children's television advertising exposure and materialism. We investigated advertised product desire as a mediating variable. A sample of 466 Dutch children (ages 8-11) was surveyed twice within a 12-month interval. The results show that advertising exposure had a positive longitudinal effect on materialism. This effect was fully mediated by children's increased desire for advertised products.
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Impact of war on individual life-cycle creativity: Tentative evidence in relation to composers
Karol Borowiecki & John O'Hagan
Journal of Cultural Economics, August 2013, Pages 347-358
Abstract:
The relationship between conflict and individual life-cycle artistic output is ambiguous, both a priori and in terms of the evidence. To address this question in relation to composers, we employ a sample of 115 prominent classical composers born after 1800 and attempt to link their annual productivity with the incidence of wars. While the sample is small and the measure of creative productivity limited, we find evidence that the impact of wars on the timing of individual creative production is significant and negative, in keeping with the evidence on the impact of wars on overall societal creative output.
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Re-Presenting Sport: How Instant Replay and Perceived Violence Impact Enjoyment of Mediated Sports
Glenn Cummins & Dustin Hahn
Mass Communication and Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars have asserted that instant replay profoundly impacted the practices and conventions of televising athletic competition. However, empirical explorations of how this technique impacts viewer response are scarce. This experiment was designed to fill this gap by exploring the relationship between instant replay, perceived violence, and enjoyment across both exciting and dull game play. Results suggest that replay impacts perceived violence such that viewing dull play followed by replay increased perceived violence, whereas the opposite was true for exciting play. Moreover, perceived violence more strongly contributed to enjoyment of dull play relative to exciting play. Taken together, these findings illustrate the potential utility of replay to impact viewer perception of mediated sports.
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Are the official world golf rankings biased?
Mark Broadie & Richard Rendleman
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, May 2013, Pages 127-140
Abstract:
Golf is a global sport with professional golfers playing on many organized tours throughout the world. The largest and most important tours for male professionals include the PGA Tour, European Tour, Japanese Tour and Asian Tour. The Official World Golf Ranking, or OWGR, is a system for ranking male professional golfers on a single scale. We say a ranking system is unbiased if otherwise identical golfers who happen to play on different tours have the same (or very similar) ranks. In this paper, we investigate whether the OWGR system is biased for or against any of the tours, and if so, by how much. To investigate any potential bias, we compare the OWGR system with two unbiased methods for estimating golfer skill and performance. The first is a score-based skill estimation (SBSE) method, which uses scoring data to estimate golfer skill, taking into account the relative difficulty of the course in each tournament round. The second is the Sagarin method, which uses win-lose-tie and scoring differential results for golfers playing in the same tournaments, to rank golfers. Neither the score-based skill method nor the Sagarin method use tour information in calculating player ranks, and therefore neither method is biased for or against any tour. Using data from 2002 to 2010 and comparing the results ranks from the OWGR and score-based methods, we find that PGA Tour golfers are penalized by an average of 26-37 OWGR ranking positions compared to non-PGA Tour golfers. Qualitatively similar results are found when comparing OWGR and Sagarin ranks. In all cases, the bias is large and statistically significant. We find a persistent bias through time and also find that the bias tends to be the largest for golfers with SBSE ranks between 40 and 120.
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Ad Revenue and Content Commercialization: Evidence from Blogs
Monic Sun & Feng Zhu
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many scholars argue that when incentivized by ad revenue, content providers are more likely to tailor their content to attract "eyeballs," and as a result, popular content may be excessively supplied. We empirically test this prediction by taking advantage of the launch of an ad-revenue-sharing program initiated by a major Chinese portal site in September 2007. Participating bloggers allow the site to run ads on their blogs and receive 50% of the revenue generated by these ads. After analyzing 4.4 million blog posts, we find that, relative to nonparticipants, popular content increases by about 13 percentage points on participants' blogs after the program takes effect. About 50% of this increase can be attributed to topics shifting toward three domains: the stock market, salacious content, and celebrities. Meanwhile, relative to nonparticipants, participants' content quality increases after the program takes effect. We also find that the program effects are more pronounced for participants with moderately popular blogs, and seem to persist after participants enroll in the program.
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Marcus Messner & Marcia DiStaso
Mass Communication and Society, July/August 2013, Pages 465-486
Abstract:
The collaboratively edited online encyclopedia Wikipedia is among the most popular websites in the world. Subsequently, it poses a great challenge to traditional encyclopedias, which for centuries have set the standards of society's knowledge with their printed editions. It is, therefore, important to study the impact of social media on the standards of our knowledge. This longitudinal panel study analyzed the framing of content in encyclopedia entries of top Fortune companies in Wikipedia and the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica in 2006, 2008 and 2010. Content analyses of the length, tonality and topics of 3,985 sentences showed that Wikipedia entries were significantly longer, more positively and negatively framed, and focused more on corporate social responsibilities and legal and ethical issues than the online entries of the traditional encyclopedia, which were predominantly neutral. The findings stress that the knowledge-generation processes in society appear to be fundamentally shifting because of the use of social media collaboration. These changes significantly impact which information becomes available to society and how it is framed.