Quantifying changes in societal optimism from online sentiment.

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Computational Social Science
• Sociology

Background:

• Psychological optimism measures often lack temporal granularity.
• Individuals express varied sentiments toward different future time points.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate the optimism curve, a novel measure of societal optimism.
• To analyze how positivity toward future timeframes varies across short, medium, and long terms.
• To investigate shifts in optimism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Main Methods:

• Sentiment analysis of over 3.5 million tweets referencing 23 distinct future time points (2 days to 30 years).
• Development of the optimism curve, analogous to the Treasury bond yield curve, to map positivity across future timelines.
• Comparative analysis of optimism trends before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Main Results:

• A consistent negative association was observed between positivity and temporal distance into the future (pre-pandemic).
• The COVID-19 pandemic inverted this trend, showing declining near-future optimism but stable distant-future optimism.
• Societal attitudes toward the future are differentiated and dynamically change in response to major events.

Conclusions:

• The optimism curve effectively captures nuanced, time-dependent societal attitudes toward the future.
• This measure offers a dynamic complement to existing static psychometric optimism assessments.
• Findings highlight the impact of external events on collective future outlook.