Generational changes in personality & frequencies of individual words 1900-2002: Modest increase for Extraversion-, Agreeableness-, and Stability-related adjectives; Intellect-related words increased up to 1960, then declined

Generational Changes in Personality: The Evidence From Corpus Linguistics. Eka Roivainen. Psychological Reports, https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294118805937

Abstract: According to theory, social change is interconnected with changes in mental phenomena and language. In the present study, secular change in the usage frequencies of common English personality adjectives (n = 336) qualifying the word person was analyzed over the period 1900 to 2002. It was hypothesized that words that represent those personality traits that are advantageous in occupations typical for modern societies have increased in frequency. The results show changes in the frequencies of individual words but stability across the five major categories of trait adjectives in the Google Books English fiction corpus. A modest increase for Extraversion-, Agreeableness-, and Stability-related adjectives was observed in the Google Books English 2012 corpus. Frequency of Intellect-related words increased up to 1960 and then declined. The results suggest that (a) human nature has changed little over the 20th century, (b) generational changes in personality are not strongly reflected in language, or (c) the corpus linguistic method used is not reliable for studying generational changes in personality.

Keywords: Personality, generational change, Google Ngram, corpus linguistics, societal change