Social salience of self-control (tight) vs-self-indulgence (loose) orientations, English books, XX century: The trend of self-control displays a steady increase throughout, self-indulgence increases from the late 70s-early 80s

The self-control vs. self-indulgence dilemma: A culturomic analysis of 20th century trends. Alberto Acerbi, Pier Luigi Sacco. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, October 6 2022, 101946. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2022.101946

Highlights

• We study the long-term dynamics of self-control vs. self-indulgence

• We adopt a culturomic approach analyzing the Google Books English corpus

• Self-indulgence shows a trend reversal around the 80s

• The analysis clearly tracks the onset of the consumerist revolution

• Our results are robust to choice of high-frequency words

Abstract: Within the conceptual framework of the Tightness-Looseness paradigm, we study the dynamics of the social salience of self-control (tight) vs-self-indulgence (loose) orientations across the 20th century on the basis of the English Google Books corpus, by means of the construction of specific lexica of which we track their relative frequency. We find that whereas the trend of self-control displays a steady increase throughout, that of self-indulgence is U-shaped, so that following a decline along the most part of the century, starting from the late 70s-early 80s we observe a reversal of the trend that signals an increasing salience of self-indulgence. Such result seems to reflect the consumerist turn that has characterized the post-industrial cycle from the 80s onwards. The coexistence of growing trends for mutually antagonizing orientations calls for further analysis of their social interplay. We also perform a parallel analysis on semantically related lexica that confirm the robustness of our findings.

Keywords: Self-controlself-indulgenceTightness-Loosenessculturomicsconsumerism

JEL: B52C89Z13