Moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency: a comparison between American and Chinese history

The study explores the cultural and historical evolution of moral attitudes toward effort and efficiency, focusing on the United States and China. It begins by posing a thought-provoking scenario: two journalists, one diligently writing articles after being made redundant by AI, the other lounging at home; which is perceived as more morally praiseworthy? Existing research suggests a cross-cultural tendency to morally praise effort irrespective of outcome, even when effort is clearly inefficient or replaceable by less effortful alternatives. This preference for effort has demonstrable behavioral consequences, such as increased charitable donations or higher salary offers to high-effort individuals, regardless of actual productivity. While this dissociation between effort and efficiency can lead to negative individual consequences (diminished learning, lack of meaningfulness), at the societal level it can foster persistence, resilience, and potentially long-term innovation and economic growth. The researchers argue that this moralization of inefficient effort is deeply rooted in a society's history and culture, citing examples like the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) in the West, which emphasizes labor and discipline as moral virtues, and Confucian values in East Asia, which stress industriousness and self-improvement. These contrasting cultural norms influence educational practices, social judgments, and economic policies, but traditional methodologies are insufficient to reveal the historical evolution of these attitudes. The current study aims to fill this gap by utilizing natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze historical text corpora from both the US and China, examining how moral values related to effort and efficiency have evolved and interacted with key historical and economic trends. This comparative approach allows for the identification of both common and unique societal and cultural drivers behind these differing evolutionary trajectories. The choice of the US and China is justified both theoretically (due to contrasting political structures, cultural values, and work ethics), and pragmatically (to address the underrepresentation of Chinese language NLP research). Three key research questions guide this work: (1) developing a computational tool to analyze moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency in Chinese and English texts; (2) charting the historical evolution trajectories of these moral attitudes; and (3) understanding their social and cultural antecedents and consequences.

The study draws upon existing literature on the moralization of effort and its cross-cultural variations. It cites research demonstrating the tendency to associate hard work with positive moral character, even when the effort is unproductive. This tendency has been observed across various cultures and in diverse contexts, affecting individual behavior and judgments as well as societal-level consequences. The researchers review the influence of cultural values, such as the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) in Western societies and Confucian values in East Asian societies, on the moral valuation of effort and achievement. While the PWE emphasizes individual achievement and efficiency, Confucian values prioritize diligence and collective effort, even if less efficient. They note the limitations of previous research, highlighting the need for large-scale historical analysis to understand the long-term evolution of these attitudes. Existing NLP-based research largely focuses on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies, making the study's cross-cultural comparison between the US and China particularly valuable. The researchers also discuss the advantages and limitations of different computational methods in studying historical psychological constructs using text analysis, including the usage of word frequency, co-occurrence analysis, and word embeddings.

The study employed a mixed-methods approach, combining natural language processing (NLP) techniques with historical text analysis. Dictionary development was a crucial first step. Dictionaries representing the concepts of "effort" and "efficiency" were created for both English and Chinese using a combination of pre-trained word embedding models (trained on diverse datasets including Google News, Wikipedia, Twitter, Renmin Web, Weibo) and human ratings. Seed words were identified from WordNet, and the 50 closest semantically similar words were extracted from each pre-trained model. These candidate words were then rated for relevance by native speakers, and the final dictionaries consisted of 10-13 words for each concept in each language. Inter-rater reliability was assessed using the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC). To represent moral values, the Moral Foundations Dictionary 2.0 (MFD 2.0) and its Chinese counterpart were used. The researchers acknowledged the existence of other moral dictionaries but justified their choice based on the availability of validated versions for both languages and their compatibility for comparative analysis. Two large corpora were used for analysis: U.S. Congressional speeches (1873-2011) and People's Daily (1950-2021). These corpora were processed on a year-by-year basis, with each year's text used to train word2vec models using the Gensim package in Python. The word embeddings generated by these models were used to compute the cosine similarity between each concept dictionary (effort/efficiency) and the moral evaluative words (from MFD 2.0), yielding measures of positive and negative moral values for each concept. Moral attitudes were then defined as the difference between positive and negative moral values. The moral attitude towards inefficient effort was specifically defined as the difference between the positive moral value of effort and the positive moral value of efficiency. To investigate relationships with socio-cultural values, measures of individualism/collectivism and cultural tightness/looseness were derived from Google Ngram data. GDP per capita data from the Maddison Project was also included as a control variable. Statistical analysis included descriptive analysis, null models for baseline comparison, Bayesian Change Point Detection to identify shifts in data patterns, and ARIMA modeling to capture long-term trends and relationships between moral attitudes and cultural/economic variables. Granger causality tests were applied to assess the directionality of the relationships between cultural values and moral attitudes. The researchers included several robustness checks in their analysis.

The study revealed distinct patterns in the evolution of moral attitudes toward effort and efficiency in the US and China. In the US, analysis of Congressional speeches showed that before the 1950s, the moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency were not significantly different. However, from the 1950s onwards, the positive moral value of effort increased dramatically, exceeding that of efficiency and coinciding with post-World War II economic prosperity. A similar pattern was observed with inefficient effort, which became increasingly positively valued during this period. In contrast, China's People's Daily corpus showed a consistently positive moral attitude toward effort throughout the studied period (1950-2021), but the positive moral value for efficiency was not consistently distinguishable from random occurrences, except for the period from the 1990s to the 2000s. The moral attitude toward inefficient effort in China was consistently positive until 1959, after which it displayed a gradual decline, particularly after 1978, with China's economic reforms and transition to a market economy. The ARIMA models and Granger causality tests revealed interesting associations between moral attitudes and socio-cultural factors. In the US corpus, cultural looseness was positively correlated with the moral value of effort and negatively correlated with the moral value of inefficient effort. Individualism positively influenced both effort and efficiency, while collectivism had a positive effect on effort, In the Chinese corpus, collectivism was a significant positive predictor of both effort and inefficient effort, while cultural looseness was negatively associated with and preceded changes in the moral value of inefficient effort. Granger tests showed a significant influence of individualism and collectivism on moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency, but not vice versa, except for the influence of inefficient effort on individualism and collectivism in the U.S. corpus and a bidirectional influence between collectivism and inefficient effort in China. There was evidence suggesting that changes in efficiency influenced individualism in China, and changes in effort influenced the tightness of norms in both cultures. Notably, in both countries, a negative relationship existed between cultural looseness and the moralization of inefficient effort.

The study's findings highlight the complex interplay between cultural values and moral attitudes toward work, revealing distinct historical trajectories in the US and China. The US's emphasis on individual achievement and the PWE is reflected in the rising moral value of effort, particularly after World War II, coinciding with a period of economic growth and optimism. The increased valuation of inefficient effort during this period may reflect a societal emphasis on hard work as an inherent virtue, regardless of immediate productivity. In contrast, China's emphasis on Confucian values, with its prioritization of collective harmony and social obligations, is reflected in the consistently positive moral attitude toward effort, even when inefficient. The decline in the moral valuation of inefficient effort since 1959, particularly during the economic reforms of the late 1970s and beyond, points to the influence of marketization and a greater emphasis on efficiency. Time series analyses revealed that cultural factors such as individualism and collectivism were significant predictors of moral attitudes toward effort, suggesting that these cultural values play a crucial role in shaping societal work ethics. The consistent negative correlation between cultural looseness and the moralization of inefficient effort across both countries suggests a broad cross-cultural tendency to devalue inefficiency in more permissive societies. The Granger tests provide insights into the causal dynamics between cultural variables and moral attitudes. The fact that cultural values are more likely to drive the changes in moral attitudes rather than vice versa indicates that societal values shape moral judgments around work ethics rather than the other way around.

This study provides valuable insights into the historical evolution of moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency in the US and China. Using NLP techniques to analyze large historical corpora, the researchers demonstrated the distinct patterns of moralization of effort and efficiency across these two culturally different societies. The findings highlight the significance of sociocultural values in shaping these attitudes and underscore the need for further research incorporating diverse textual sources and a broader historical timeframe to examine similar questions across other cultures. Future research could explore how AI-driven automation might further transform moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency.

The study acknowledges several limitations. The use of formal, politically oriented corpora (Congressional speeches and People's Daily) may not fully represent the broad spectrum of societal attitudes. The time frames studied, while encompassing major societal shifts, could be expanded for a richer historical analysis. Finally, reliance on the MFD 2.0 for measuring moral values represents only one approach, and future studies could benefit from integrating and comparing other available methodologies. The lack of granular geographic breakdown within each country and the limited number of words in the dictionaries represent other limitations.