President Obama is getting credit for one odd thing in a new paper - diminishing American exceptionalism and confidence. America is a lot less egotistical than it used to be.
American exceptionalism rose considerably throughout the 19th century - European nations discussed America in conferences the way China is discussed now - and America's entry into World War I solidified the perception that America was already a world power. What progressive President Woodrow Wilson called "a crusade to make the world safe for democracy" was also a continental coming out party. When General "Black Jack" Pershing got off that boat and refused to listen to European Field Marshall's who believed they outranked him because he was only a General, he was sending a clear message - it was an American century.
In the 21st century, America rolled over Iraq in record time, but then there was insecurity about how to occupy a country - insecurity that hadn't been evident in Germany or Japan or Korea and despite knowing how successful those occupations have been.
There were clearly cracks in confidence and worries over instant polls and it was the first sign American egotism seems to be over, say psychologists William Chopik, Deepti Joshi and Professor Sara Konrath from the University of Michigan, who made their determination by analyzing U.S. presidential State of the Union addresses from 1790 through 2012.
Is that an accurate method? It's as accurate as anything else when it comes to mass psychological profiles, which means it could easily be dismissed as another spurious correlation in the social sciences. But the premise may be reasonable. Politicians primarily get elected because they tap into the beliefs of the public and that is reflected in the tone of their State of the Union speeches. A lot of self-loathing Democrats did not like America in 2008 and they outvoted irrationally optimistic Republicans by a substantial margin. The same thing happened in 2012 - we have become a "you didn't build that" culture instead of a "yes we can" one and the speeches of the president reflect that. State of the Union speeches reflect that.
The authors used the Linguistic and Inquiry Word Count software to sift words related to "self-interest" and "other-interest" in all available State of the Union addresses. Obviously they calibrated the verbage so you should also calibrate the researchers accordingly - because psychologists are in the mainstream of academia overall but not science, and not the public. They unsurprisingly found that right after American independence, egotism was low. That makes sense. Everyone in the colonies was still British and outside elites in major colonies, independence was regarded as the efforts by a bunch of rich white guys who didn't want to pay their taxes. It was only later that the public realized "America" could be a thing.
The first-ever State of the Union address, delivered by George Washington, was as humble as he was.
Like retrospective analyses designed to affirm a hunch about egotism, success often leads people to affirm that whatever behavior people engage in. If things are going backward, it is external forces, if things are successful, it is all initiative and creative reflex. America has more individual success stories than any other country around now but for most people it was just a matter of luck being born here.
And so they find that egotism is more prevalent during boom times.
"We found that self-interest tends to peak after economic booms," said William Chopik, first author of the paper in Personality and Individual Differencesand a graduate student in psychology at the University. "In the 20th century, it peaked after World War II and again in the 1970s."
Self-interest was determined if words used were possessives or first person "I" and "mine", even "mother" gets lumped in there, because psychologists lump that in with self. So 'mothers, your sons are home from war' can be egotism while 'your neighbor is home from war' was deemed other-interested.
There's just one problem with that assertion. There was no economic boom in the 1970s - it was an era of the oil crisis and "stagflation" and rationing and the economic "malaise" that turned Jimmy Carter into a one-term presidential failure. The 1970s killed Keynesian economics, where it stayed dead until 2009.
After World War II makes some sense, though less so based on economics. World War II itself was actually a time of ration books and scarcity and prior to that it was a Depression so, sure, with those two things left behind there was more pride - people were happy to be able to buy sugar again.
Is such American egotism over for good or just in a 1970s style down cycle because of the moribund economy? Hard to say, those determinations are only made in hindsight.
When it comes to the budget, red is the new black. So if American
Purely self-interested words included "I, me, mine." Words such as "mother" that referred to immediate family members were considered moderate in self-interest because they overlapped with the self. Purely other-interested words included "his/her" and words such as "neighbor" that referred to community members. As part of the study, the researchers created a historical self-interest index, the Egocentricity Index, which subtracted the other-interested words from the self-interested ones.
The study is the longest temporal analysis of trends in egocentricity to date, situating the recently document rise in narcissism (a form of egotism) among American college students within a longer historical context.
"Not only has self-interest been increasing in the past century or so, but there was a surprisingly long period in U.S. history when the nation was relatively high in other-interest," Joshi said.
So why is America becoming a more egocentric society?
"Historical changes are complex, and it is hard to point a finger at one specific cause," Chopik said. "However, with increasing prosperity for many Americans, there could be more emphasis on 'me, me, me,' with personal needs and desires taking precedence over community needs.
"And there may also be more pressure to succeed over the past couple of centuries. In some ways, we've become a more competitive society, and perhaps what we're seeing in presidential addresses is a reflection of this trend."
But do State of the Union addresses mirror the egocentricity of the electorate or just telegraph the egotism of the Commander in Chief?
"Unfortunately, we have no way of quantifying the self-interest of the presidents themselves," Chopik said. "But people generally vote for politicians whose traits most resemble their own, and the content of presidential speeches might well reflect what politicians think the people want to hear."
