Language use reflects psychological dispositions: women’s language includes more references to people whereas men’s language focuses more on objects (Newman et al., 2008), a trend explained by evolutionary theory (Luoto, forthcoming). Evolutionary theory further predicts that environmental factors such as climate and pathogen prevalence impose a considerable influence on human psychology. This prediction has been empirically validated: cultures with a higher pathogen load are more collectivistic while cultures with a lower pathogen load are more individualistic (Fincher et al., 2008). Climate, which correlates with pathogen prevalence, is a further predictor of individualism so that populations from colder climates are more individualistic (Hofstede, 2001). We examine variation in authors’ “analytical intelligence” (Sternberg, 2017; Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010) and their focus on people versus objects by using corpus-based text analysis of literary fiction from regions around the world. Following predictions from evolutionary theory, we hypothesise that word use focusing on people correlates positively with pathogen prevalence and negatively with distance from equator, while word use focusing on objects correlates negatively with pathogen prevalence and positively with distance from equator. Analytical intelligence is hypothesised to correlate with distance from equator (Sternberg, 2017). We use the semantic codes in Wmatrix (Rayson, 2009) to extract the semantic domains concerning people, objects, and analytical intelligence. Our findings provide new evidence for the cross-cultural psychological questions on geographical and sex differences in analytical intelligence and the psychological salience of people vs. objects, as indexed by word use in literary fiction.
Fincher et al. (2008). Pathogen prevalence predicts human cross-cultural variability in individualism/collectivism. Proceedings B, 275, 1279-1285.
Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Luoto, S. (forthcoming). Extended phenotypes via life history theory: an updated theoretical framework for human sexual selection.
Newman et al. (2008). Gender differences in language use: An analysis of 14,000 text samples. Discourse Processes, 45, 211-236.
Rayson, P. (2009). Wmatrix: a web-based corpus processing environment. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/
Sternberg, R. J. (2017). An alternative interpretation of climate data: Intelligence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40.
Tausczik, Y. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). The psychological meaning of words. J Lang Soc Psychol., 29(1), 24-54.
