Brand Charlotte O, Acerbi Alberto, Mesoudi Alex
Human Behaviour and Cultural Evolution Group, Biosciences, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Penryn, UK.
Faculty of Science, Department for Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, University of Tübingen, Germany.
Evol Hum Sci. 2019 Nov 7;1:e11. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2019.11. eCollection 2019.
Popular music offers a rich source of data that provides insights into long-term cultural evolutionary dynamics. One major trend in popular music, as well as other cultural products such as literary fiction, is an increase over time in negatively valenced emotional content, and a decrease in positively valenced emotional content. Here we use two large datasets containing lyrics from = 4913 and = 159,015 pop songs respectively and spanning 1965-2015, to test whether cultural transmission biases derived from the cultural evolution literature can explain this trend towards emotional negativity. We find some evidence of content bias (negative lyrics do better in the charts), prestige bias (best-selling artists are copied) and success bias (best-selling songs are copied) in the proliferation of negative lyrics. However, the effects of prestige and success bias largely disappear when unbiased transmission is included in the models, which assumes that the occurrence of negative lyrics is predicted by their past frequency. We conclude that the proliferation of negative song lyrics may be explained partly by content bias, and partly by undirected, unbiased cultural transmission.
流行音乐提供了丰富的数据来源，能让我们洞察长期的文化进化动态。流行音乐以及其他文化产品（如文学小说）的一个主要趋势是，随着时间的推移，负性情绪内容增加，正性情绪内容减少。在此，我们使用两个大型数据集，分别包含4913首和159,015首流行歌曲的歌词，时间跨度为1965年至2015年，以检验文化进化文献中得出的文化传播偏差是否能解释这种向情绪负性转变的趋势。我们发现，在负面歌词的传播中存在一些内容偏差（负面歌词在排行榜上表现更好）、声望偏差（畅销艺术家被模仿）和成功偏差（畅销歌曲被模仿）的证据。然而，当模型中纳入无偏差传播时（即假设负面歌词的出现是由其过去的频率预测的），声望偏差和成功偏差的影响基本消失。我们得出结论，负面歌曲歌词的传播可能部分由内容偏差解释，部分由无方向、无偏差的文化传播解释。
