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CURRENT
RESEARCH IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY NINE PSYCHOLOGISTS: MAPPING THE COLLECTIVE MIND
WITH GOOGLE
by Jack B. Arnold, Saint Marys College of California, Retired
ABSTRACT
All pairs of names generated by the individual names
of nine historically important psychologists were submitted as queries
to the Google search engine. The resulting page counts were used
to generate similarity/dissimilarity indices that were submitted
to both cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling. Both of the
analyses separated the names into three distinct clusters that were
easily associated with three historically important schools of psychology.
The purpose
of the study was to examine the idea that the world-wide-web contains
latent structures of the sort made familiar awhile ago by Charles
Osgood. Earlier related data, gathered by the author in the last
three or four years, is summarized and presented as further evidence
that Osgood meaning may be latent in the world-wide-web. Questions
regarding appropriate indices of similarity/dissimilarity and problems
of the reliability and validity of these procedures and their results
are discussed. Evidence is presented for all of these qualities
in the results of this study.
Finally, it is demonstrated that at least one of Osgoods connotative
Semantic Differential factors is hidden in the structure of the
world-wide-web.
INTRODUCTION
With the amount of discussion that has been generated lately about
Google and the, so called, semantic web or Semweb (for example,
Ford, 2002a, b), I am surprised that some psychologist has not noticed
and remarked publicly that the coarse structure of the world-wide-web
may be hiding semantic structures in which psychologists have, in
the past, shown great interest. Here I am using the term "semantic
structure" in an old fashioned sense that, I think, would warm
Charles Osgoods heart (Osgood et al., pp. 25-124 and elsewhere).
Events like the following sometimes occur during a Google search:
(a) The search term, {+Freud +Jung}, finds 6760 documents. (b)The
search term, {+Freud
+Rembrandt}, co-occurs in only 645 documents. [1] Having noticed
several of these occurrences, I am further surprised that our hypothetical
psychologist wasnt moved to infer that those numbers might
index the similarity of meaning of the co-occurring concepts (again
using Osgoods sense of meaning).
At least a couple of computer scientists (Cilibrasi and Vitynai,
2005) have made this inference and I suggest that much of their
paper is likely to be both accessible and interesting to psychologists.
Osgood is remembered for, at last, three significant contributions
to the behavioral/social sciences. He developed a mediational theory
of meaning based on conditioning (Osgood, Suci & Tannenbaum,
1957, pp. 5-9). He developed a construct, the "semantic space,"
where the meaning of a concept is represented as a vector in a space
spanned by an unknown (but discoverable) number of dimensions of
meaning (Osgood, Suci & Tannenbaum, 1957, p. 25). And he developed
a method, the Semantic Differential, for discovering the location,
or meaning, of the concepts within the semantic space (Osgood, Suci
& Tannenbaum, pp. 18-30, and elsewhere). The mediational theory
is rarely mentioned now. However, the spatial model and the measurement
method are alive in several areas of behavioral/social science research.
I did a Google search for the term +"Semantic Differential"
and found 149,000 references. The Google Scholar service (Google
website, n.d) classified 920 of these as scholarly works published
between 2004 and 2006.
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