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News

News: April/May 2019

Word frequency reveals morality’s tides • Marx’s tomb vandalised • Black holes evade conceptual capture — News reports by Anja Steinbauer

Moral Talk and Moral Conflict

Researchers Nick Haslam, Melanie McGrath, and Melissa Wheeler of the University of Melbourne in Australia have traced the development of moral language over more than 100 years. Using a program called Google NGram Viewer they searched for 304 terms with moral content in the English language Google Books database. The search covered books published between 1900 and 2007. While they found an overall decline in the use of words conveying general morality, such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘moral’, and ‘evil’, there was a sudden and remarkable turning point around 1980: “The fifth period, from around 1980 to the end of the study period in 2007, involves a relatively sudden shift in the salience of moral concepts.” From then on, they write, “moral content increasingly saturates the database”.

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