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Morality in songs – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

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Morality in songs – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

Pop Music Echoes a Growing Culture of Vices

A monumental study from the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London reveals that popular music lyrics have grown increasingly negative over the past six decades, signaling a profound shift in global cultural values. By deploying advanced artificial intelligence and computational language analysis to scrutinize more than 380,000 songs released between 1960 and 2023, researchers mapped the largest historical dataset of moral content in music to date. The findings act as a powerful cultural barometer: over the last 60 years, expressions linked to traditional moral virtues like care, decency, and social connection have steadily plummeted. In their place, modern popular music has seen a stark rise in language associated with moral vices, including harm, cheating, subversion, and degradation. This cross-generational evolutionary shift toward darker emotional narratives, anger, and disgust offers unprecedented insight into how contemporary societies communicate identity, collective values, and psychological distress. ….[READ]

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