A growing trend in US Congressional speeches suggests that elected members are increasingly relying on intuition and emotional appeals over evidence-based reasoning.
The Shift from Data-Driven to Rhetorical Rhetoric in US Congressional Speeches
A growing trend suggests that elected members of the US Congress are increasingly relying on intuition and emotional appeals over evidence-based reasoning in their speeches.
The United States Congress is a bicameral legislature, consisting of two houses: the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The House has 435 members, each representing a district within a state, while the Senate has 100 members, with each state having two senators.
Members of both houses are elected by the people through direct election for varying term lengths.
The House serves a two-year term, whereas Senators serve six years.
The Rise of Anti-Intellectualism in Politics
An analysis of millions of congressional speech transcripts reveals a shift away from words like ‘proof’ and ‘reason’ towards phrases such as ‘fake news‘ and ‘mislead‘. This linguistic trend coincides with rising political polarization in Congress and declining numbers of laws enacted through the legislative process.
According to Stephan Lewandowsky, a University of Bristol researcher who led the study, this shift reflects broader societal attitudes towards truth and evidence. ‘We can think that truth is something we can achieve based on analysis of evidence, or we can think of it as the result of intuition or ‘gut feeling‘,’ he notes.
Lewandowski is a Polish surname of German origin.
It is derived from the Old High German word 'lau' meaning 'lion' and 'wandi' meaning 'protector'.
In modern times, the name has gained international recognition due to its association with Robert Lewandowski, a renowned Polish professional footballer who plays as a striker for Bayern Munich and the Poland national team.
The name's history dates back to medieval Europe, where it was often bestowed upon individuals known for their bravery and strength.
A Contextual Analysis of Language Use
Lewandowsky’s team used an off-the-shelf AI language model to analyze the words used in congressional speeches between 1879 and 2022. They compared these transcripts with representative groups of evidence-based keywords, such as ‘logic‘ and ‘reason’, and intuition-based keywords, like ‘suspicion‘ and ‘gut’. The researchers found that Congress has increasingly favored intuition-based language over evidence-based language since the 1970s.
Implications for Public Discourse
The study’s findings have implications for public discourse and the role of science in politics. Renáta Németh, a researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, notes that the models used in this analysis can capture deeper, often subtle associations between words, reflecting cultural meanings and social relations.
As Lewandowsky and his colleagues plan to explore similar language shifts in individual lawmakers’ speeches and social media posts, it is clear that this trend has broader implications for the way we engage with evidence and reason in public life.
A language shift occurs when a community adopts a new language as its primary means of communication, often replacing the original language.
This can be driven by factors such as globalization, urbanization, or government policies.
Language shift can result in language loss and cultural erosion.
According to Ethnologue, over 2,000 languages are at risk of extinction due to language shift.
In some cases, language shift can also lead to language revitalization efforts, where communities work to preserve their native language.
