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Big Data in Computational Social Science and Humanities pp 117–137Cite as

Has Homo economicus Evolved into Homo sapiens from 1992 to 2014: What Does Corpus Linguistics Say?

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Part of the book series: Computational Social Sciences ((CSS))

Abstract

Thaler (Journal of Economic Perspectives 14:133–141, 2000) predicted that the paradigm of Homo economicus, which basically formulates the rationality of economic behavior in an ideal mathematical optimization framework and had dominated orthodox economics for a substantial period of the entire twentieth century, would “evolve” into the paradigm of Homo sapiens, which emphasizes the consideration of the psychological, cultural, and social factors that constrain a human’s rationality. We applied a corpus linguistic approach to examine whether this prediction is true. To this end, we built a corpus using the abstracts of 51,285 economics research articles published from 1992 to 2014 in 42 mainstream economics journals. By analyzing the upward-trending and downward-trending words in this corpus, we found the Homo sapiens paradigm to have expanded significantly, while there was no clear evidence of the concession of the Homo economicus paradigm. From the analysis of increasingly used words related to Homo sapiens we can further attribute the expansion of the Homo sapiens paradigm to the research attention increasingly drawn to the interdisciplinary integration of the social sciences, human heterogeneity and (cognitive) constraints, and the complexity of economic behaviors. Likewise, from the analysis of words related to Homo economicus that are less and less used, we found that the research attention directed to the concept of equilibrium was gradually drawn away. Our main finding based on the corpus linguistic analysis was further supported and consolidated by the co-word network analysis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/analytical/jcr/

  2. 2.

    http://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?area=2000

  3. 3.

    Since only WordSmith can recognize stemmed words, a.k.a., the “*” symbol, and ConText cannot, we removed the * symbol and changed the stemmed words to normal words when using the tool ConText.

  4. 4.

    In a sense, this simply means that it is becoming increasingly difficult for the pure theoretical model to be accepted and published.

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Acknowledgements

The second author is grateful for the research support in the form of Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) Grants, MOST 106-2410-H-004-006-MY2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Biology and Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Yawen Zou

  2. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China

    Yawen Zou

  3. AI-ECON Research Center, Department of Economics, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Shu-Heng Chen

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  1. Yawen Zou
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  2. Shu-Heng Chen
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Correspondence to Yawen Zou .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. AI-ECON Research Center, Department of Economics, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Shu-Heng Chen

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Zou, Y., Chen, SH. (2018). Has Homo economicus Evolved into Homo sapiens from 1992 to 2014: What Does Corpus Linguistics Say?. In: Chen, SH. (eds) Big Data in Computational Social Science and Humanities. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95465-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95465-3_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95464-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95465-3

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