A few years ago, four scientists set out to count words.
Not a handful of words—all of them. Every book Google had digitized, millions of volumes in English and Spanish, going back to 1850.
They sorted the language into two camps:
On one side, the words of reason: fact, data, method, analysis, conclusion, determine. On the other, the words of feeling: feel, believe, hope, fear, faith, sense. Then they tracked which camp was gaining ground, year by year, across almost 170 years of almost everything people had written down or printed.
They published their findings in PNAS, which is about as serious as science journals get, and it deserves our attention.
For about 130 years, reason was king. From 1850 onward, the fact-based words kept gaining, decade over decade. On paper, we were becoming a more measured, more evidence-minded people. The line just goes up and up.
But it peaks around 1980.
Then it drops like a stone. By about 2007 the two lines cross and the language of feeling shoots past the language of fact and just keeps on climbing.
In less than one lifetime, we undid a century and a half of reason-based movement.
It’s easy to jump to conclusions as to why this has happened. The easy answer is "screens," since computers, then smartphones, and social media make the timing look pretty suspicious. I mean, reason peaks right about when the personal computers enter daily life, and feeling takes over right about when social media does. I noticed it too, but I’m unconvinced. Neither were the scientists who published the study.
What they concluded is more interesting than the screens answer, anyway.
They found the turn started back in the late 1970s, way before anybody had a smartphone or a PC. In fact, their best guess for what kicked it off wasn't technology at all. It was people starting to feel like maybe the whole system was rigged against them—like the government and the experts and the institutions weren't really on their side anymore and maybe hadn’t ever been. Once folks stopped trusting all that, they also stopped caring much for the cool, factual, just-the-numbers way of talking that those institutions ran on.
I think they're onto something, and honestly I totally get it. If you're pretty sure the game is fixed, then some guy telling you to "just look at the data" sounds like part of the con—like he's the one running the crooked table and he'd rather you didn't ask questions. Could this be why young people are so keen on socialism and even communism, despite history that shows them exactly where these ideologies lead?
I think it might be exactly why.
Look, it's not that people having feelings is bad. Feelings are fine. I'm a dad, I've got plenty of them.
Old Ben Franklin put it about as well as anybody when, 250-odd years ago in Poor Richard's Almanack, he said that, "If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins."
He wasn't advocating for getting rid of passion. Passion is the engine—it's where your energy and your nerve and your get-up-and-go come from. He's just saying to keep a hand on the reins so you aren’t ruled by emotion, because emotion unreined will drag you right off a cliff.
What this study shows, more than anything, is that a lot of people are letting go of the reins.
Which would be one thing if nobody was around to take advantage of it. But there's a whole business now—campaign people, ad people, and the algorithms running your feed—that has gotten scary good at grabbing the reins the second you drop them.
Here's how it works (I know you've felt it): You're scrolling along, and something makes you furious. A headline built to make your blood boil, or a clip clipped to leave out the part that would show nuance or complicate your initial emotion. By the time you've reacted, shared it, argued about it, you never once stopped to ask if it was even true. Once you’re that invested, it is very very hard for you to change your mind. It’s just human behavior.
But the clipping and soundbite-ing isn’t an accident. Somebody engineered it.
Somebody benefits when your feelings take the wheel.
The person who can feel and still stop and think for a second, that person is really hard to trick. Someone who just takes what they’ve seen or read at face-value every time is the easiest mark there is.
That's actually why I wrote Mind Wars. It's a book about the specific ways people get played—the tricks, the manipulations, the buttons that get pushed—and how to build a mind that keeps hold of the reins. I wrote it because I watched what was observed in this study happen in real time, and I wanted to put some armor in people's hands so they were better prepared for the war being waged for their hearts and minds.
But, Mind Wars is written for grownups, but it's a lot easier to hold onto those reins as an adult if somebody put them in your hands when you were a kid—long before the whole world spent decades training you to run on feeling alone.
That's the whole reason we make the Tuttle Twins guidebooks for teens, and it's why I'd steer parents to The Tuttle Twins Guide to Logical Fallacies specifically. It's basically the teenage version of what Mind Wars does for adults, except it's a book a kid will actually read.
The tricks are laid out in stories and examples instead of some dry textbook. It teaches how a bad argument gets dressed up to sound smart, how somebody slides a fast one past you, and how to stop and say, "hang on, that doesn't actually add up." A kid who's read it can see the seams in a slick argument, so they don't get pulled along by it.
Pair it with our Guide to Beware Your Bias, and your teenager's got most of what they need to keep their own head on straight.
All of our Guidebooks are included in our Back to School Sale. You can check them out here!
Unfortunately, our kids are entering their most formative years at a time when feeling has already crushed fact. Nobody has to teach them to feel—every screen they own is on that job around the clock. It's the other part they're missing, and that's on us. They need meaningful reins.
We need to help them learn how to feel something, then stop, and before they do anything about it, ask if it's actually true and who might stand to gain if they believe it.
The ability to rein in emotion and let reason guide gets taught at your kitchen table, one conversation at a time or it doesn't get taught at all.
We just make resources to help in the vital work you’re doing. Thanks for bringing us along.
— Connor
