Department of Psychology, San Diego State University, San Diego, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2012;7(7):e40181. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040181. Epub 2012 Jul 10.
Cultural products such as song lyrics, television shows, and books reveal cultural differences, including cultural change over time. Two studies examine changes in the use of individualistic words (Study 1) and phrases (Study 2) in the Google Books Ngram corpus of millions of books in American English. Current samples from the general population generated and rated lists of individualistic words and phrases (e.g., "unique," "personalize," "self," "all about me," "I am special," "I'm the best"). Individualistic words and phrases increased in use between 1960 and 2008, even when controlling for changes in communal words and phrases. Language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960.
文化产品，如歌词、电视剧和书籍，揭示了文化差异，包括随时间的文化变化。两项研究考察了个体主义词汇（研究 1）和短语（研究 2）在谷歌书籍 Ngram 语料库中数百万本美国英语书籍中的使用变化。当前从普通人群中生成并对个体主义词汇和短语（例如，“独特”，“个性化”，“自我”，“全是关于我”，“我是特别的”，“我是最好的”）进行评分的列表。即使控制了共通体词汇和短语的变化，个体主义词汇和短语的使用在 1960 年至 2008 年间也有所增加。自 1960 年以来，美国书籍中的语言越来越关注自我和独特性。
