Debate Magazine

Evidence of Americans Becoming Increasingly Narcissistic – in One Graph

By Eowyn @DrEowyn

narcissist

Americans are becoming increasingly narcissistic.

Studies have shown that college students are more narcissistic than past generations. Even psychiatrists say they’re seeing more patients who are pathological narcissists.

Here’s another indicator of the rise in narcissism.

The Google Ngram Viewer is an online phrase-usage graphing tool that charts the yearly count of selected n-grams (letter combinations) or words and phrases,as found in over 5.2 million books (containing 500 billion words) digitized by Google Inc.

As such, the Google Ngram is a window to the zeitgeist (spirit of the time).

Tyler Durden reports for Zero Hedge, Feb. 21, 2014, that, as measured by the percentage of times that words such as “me,” “want,” and “fair” are mentioned in books, American and the world did become more narcissistic.

Google Ngram

Beginning in the mid-1960s, the words “me” and “want” increased in number, whereas the word “fair” decreased. In other words, more and more we are concerned about “me” and what I “want,” and less and less about what’s “fair”.

~Eowyn


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