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THREAD: together with @Oliver_S_Curry and Marc Cheong, I'm developing custom Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionaries for each of the 7 elements in the morality-as-cooperation hypothesis 1/ https://tinyurl.com/yyddynn6
LIWC was developed by @jwpennebaker, a psychologist at UT-Austin https://liwc.wpengine.com/
Some of its functionality has been implemented as an R package (liwcalike) by Kenneth Benoit at LSE https://github.com/kbenoit/LIWCalike
Anyway, the awesome thing about both LIWC and liwcalike is that they make it possible to operationalize constructs using lists of words, n-grams, and stems
The theory of morality-as-cooperation is that morality is a set of rules, values, institutions, norms, and technologies that are aimed at solving non-zero-sum games that are recurrent in human social life 5/
According to a recent paper by @Oliver_S_Curry, these solutions are commonly considered morally good the world over https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701478 6/
In the paper I just linked to, Curry's team painstakingly hand-coded the anthropological record of 60 different cultures from around the globe 7/
We wanted to see whether it was possible to automate that process using LIWC dictionaries. Low and behold -- it is! 8/
In the spreadsheet linked at the top of this thread, I've summarized the moral values expressed in all American State of the Union (SOTU) addresses, from George Washington to the current asswipe
There are clear and interpretable trends. For instance, heroism rises in frequency from 1811 to 1814, just as the war of 1812 is occurring 10/
Likewise, during the Roaring Twenties, Coolidge puts great emphasis on the value of property 11/
