Psychological Change and Kinship Intensity in China over Two Millennia

A growing body of evidence suggests that important aspects of psychology culturally co-evolve with different institutions and social norms over historical time. Here, using two classical Chinese corpora, we apply a new computational text-analysis pipeline to capture psychological characteristics across time (770 BCE to 1911 CE) and space (270 prefectures). Our results offer two key insights. First, our psychological measures demonstrate both substantial regional variation and non-linear temporal dynamics, bringing into question any monolithic, static, linear, or essentialized views of Chinese psychology. Second, to explain historical and regional diversity in psychological traits, we test and find support for the hypothesis that family organizations—captured by kinship intensity—predictably co-evolve with particular socio-cooperative aspects of psychology. Our contribution extends efforts to measure psychological attributes from textual sources beyond Western societies (and predominantly English-language data) and highlights the importance of kinship in shaping psychological outcomes in Chinese history.