Poster #177 - The Effects of Terrorism on Cultural Values for Families

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Integrative Statement

Recent work has demonstrated that the salience of moral values oriented to authority increased in American culture following the 9/11/2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center which caused enormous damage and death to thousands (Hart, Epstein, & Chiu, 2018).

Our hypothesis, tested in this research, is that the attack heightened concern in the United States for orderly family life.

We employ a culturomics approach (Michel et al., 2011), assessing cultural salience and change over time by charting the salience of words in millions of published texts digitized by Google. Using optical character recognition (OCR), Google has digitized over 15 million books. We used data from books in this database published between 1900 and 2009. The culturomics approach assumes that the waxing and waning of cultural salience of particular ideas is reflected in the year-to-year changes in the frequency of associated words in published books. Our primary analyses focus on books published in the United States, because our hypothesis concerns the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attack on American culture.

Specifically, we examined the relative frequency of the phrases “obedient child” and “disobedient child” in books published in the United States before and following the 9/11 attack. As is evident in Figure 1, the salience of the phrases “obedient child” and “disobedient child” increased sharply in salience following the 9/11 terrorist event.

To test the significance of the 9/11 attack on the time series depicted in Figure 1, we applied an interrupted time-series analysis. Specifically, we used the Bayesian structural time-series approach described by Brodersen, Gallusser, Koehler, Remy, and Scott (2015). The goal in this analysis is to estimate the causal impact of an intervention—in this research the terrorist attack on 9/11/01--on a time series, formulated as the difference between the time series that is observed and the time series that would have obtained in the absence of the intervention. To estimate the time series that would have occurred in the absence of the intervention, called by Brodersen et al the synthetic control, information is drawn from the time series prior to the intervention, and, when possible, from related time series that were not exposed to the intervention. In our analysis, the related time series is for the same phrases in books published in Great Britain. The analysis suggest that the data are consistent with the interpretation that the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center resulted in a heightened concern for obedience in American children.

Powerful threats evoke concern for maintaining order (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004). Our research uses a relatively novel method to demonstrate that this concern extends to family functioning, with the frequency of the phrases “obedient child” and “disobedient child” increasing sharply in American books following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Our findings may contribute to understanding changes in parental behavior and the surprising interest of the American public in books focusing on family discipline such as Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, published in 2011.

Authors

• Daniel Hart, Rutgers
  Presenting Author

• I-Ming Chiu, Rutgers University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Richard Epstein, Rutgers University
  Non-Presenting Author