Measuring Ideas

Description

More than a hundred years ago, Max Weber asked himself a question that still vexes social scientists. How, he wondered, can ideas become ‘effective forces in history?’¹ How can things like beliefs or narratives, visions of the futures or conjurations of the past change the ways in which people act and interact? However, social scientists have long maintained a somewhat standoffish relationship with ideational explanations.

Some viewed ideas as ‘the product of circumstances and interests’ or, at most, as ‘weapons framed for the furtherance of interests.’² Others thought that ideas may well matter, but they are simply too hard to measure. Ideas, Philip Converse famously quipped, are a ‘primary exhibits for the doctrine that what is important to study cannot be measured and that what can be measured is not important to study.’³

However, two recent developments have given new life to the study of ideas in the social sciences. On the one hand, the literature has made great inroads into more carefully conceptualizing ideas and clarifying their causal role in social and political processes. On the other hand, advances in computational text analysis, turbocharged by the advent and rapid improvements of transformer-based (language) models, offer social scientists powerful tools to analyze complex ideational concepts at scale.

Building on this confluence of conceptual and technical advances, I am currently exploring the potential of transformer-based models for discovery and measurement of ideational concepts as well as applying these measures for downstream inference tasks.

Resources

• This poster provides an overview of a project in which I explore the potential of transformer-based models to measure ideas at scale through a pilot study on the imagined futures of Web3. Web3 is a particularly apt case study given the central role of storytelling and the projection of personal and collective futures in the world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

Footnotes

1. Weber, Max (2007): The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge, p. 48.

2. Carr, Edward H. (2016 [1939]): The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939. Reissued with a New Preface from Michael Cox. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, p. 65.

3. Converse, Philip E. (1964): The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics. In David E. Apter (Ed.): Ideology and Discontent. New York: The Free Press, p. 206.