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

In some cultures, merely exerting effort is considered virtuous, even when the effort is inefficient. Our study examines how this moral attitude towards effort (relative to efficiency) has evolved historically across two distinct sociopolitical and linguistic contexts: the People’s Republic of China and the United States, using natural language processing techniques. Specifically, two formal political corpora were used—the People’s Daily (1950–2021) and the Congressional speeches for the U.S. (1873–2011). We developed dictionaries for each concept based on pre-trained word embedding models in both languages. Moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency were calculated on a year-by-year basis as the cosine similarity between the dictionaries of these concepts and an existing dictionary of morality. We benchmarked the fluctuations of moral attitude towards inefficient effort against critical historical events in the two countries. Additional time series analysis and Granger tests revealed the association and potential directionality between the evolution of moral attitude towards inefficient effort and critical socio-cultural variables such as collectivism and cultural looseness. Our research sheds light on the historical and socio-cultural roots of moralization of effort and has implications for historical psychology research on moral attitudes.