Shifting Relational Norms Across Time: An Analysis of 19th and 20th Century Corpora

Relational norms – culturally prescribed expectations that guide behavior within relationships – structure everyday interactions and judgments (Earp et al., 2021). This study analyzes shifts in relational norms (care, hierarchy, transaction, and mating; Bugental, 2002) across key relationships (e.g., parent–child, romantic partners) using U.S. Congressional speeches (1873–2010), China’s People’s Daily (1950–2021), and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Sentences are embedded using GPT-3’s text-embedding model to generate yearly semantic representations. For each norm–relationship pairing, anchor embeddings (prototype sentences reflecting the norm in context) are constructed, and semantic similarity is computed between yearly sentence embeddings and their corresponding anchors. These semantic similarity time series are then linked to exogenous variables, including GDP per capita, and major historical events (e.g., World War I & II, the Cultural Revolution, etc.).