Quantum mechanics

Linguistics

Legislature

Philosophy

Scholarship

Presidency

Certainty

Economics

Presidential system

Physics

Politics

Political science

Epistemology

Political economy

Sociology

Political culture

Positive economics

Term (time)

Social science

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Significance Donald Trump and a small group of emerging leaders around the world have been labeled as outliers in the ways that they think and communicate with others. Are they really anomalies, or do they fit into larger political trends? This study adds to existing scholarship by analyzing two important psychological dimensions, analytic thinking and confidence, in 12 large corpora of political texts representing political leaders of various levels in both the United States and other countries as well as 4 corpora of cultural texts. Rather than being anomalous, linguistic analyses find that, over the last century, there have been consistent declines in analytic thinking and rises in confidence in the ways that political leaders communicate with the public.

Examining long-term trends in politics and culture through language of political leaders and cultural institutions