Marten Scheffer and his team conducted a Google nGram Viewer content analysis of a corpus of millions of books published between 1850 and 2019 in English and Spanish for the frequency of words indicating the balance of two thought processes: logical reasoning (led by rationality) and intuitive understanding (which is based on emotions).
— The use of words associated with rationality of thought (argument based on facts, such as «determine», «conclude», etc.) grew steadily between the initial year of the study (1850) and the 1980s.
— In the 1980s, this trend broke down — the «era of rationality» ended. The frequency of words related to facts began to steadily decrease, while the frequency of emotionally colored words (such as «feel», «believe», etc.) — just as steadily increased.
— This new trend of the «era of irrationality» has accelerated even more since about 2007, when a parallel strong trend appeared in languages - a shift in the balance of words that reflect some collectively recognized truths, towards words that appeal to personal experience.
These results, obtained for English and Spanish, looked so egregious that the authors were forced to test them in other languages. This test confirmed the universality of the conclusions for seven languages, including the Russian language.
The above three conclusions of the study can be summarized as follows.
The new dominant mindset in modern society is increasingly losing its rationality and reliance on collectively recognized truths, becoming more emotional and appealing to personal experience.
It would be quite logical to assume the following bouquet of three “humanitarian” trends as the consequences of this megatrend.
— The gradual transformation of humanity into a world of idiots; the growth of intellectual blindness, which is increasing the discrepancy between reality and the faith of billions of people.
— The triumph of fakes and post-truths: facts cease to work as an effective tool of persuasion; the boundaries of truth are blurred to the point of complete indistinguishability; value assessments of what is happening are deformed.
— Degradation of the reflexive (analytical) thinking that used to dominate in worldview issues, with the simultaneous strengthening of intuitive thinking based on feelings and personal experience.