IPHS 300: AI for Humanity
Document Type
Poster
Publication Date
Spring 2026
Abstract
This project uses psycholinguistics—the systematic measurement of psychological orientation through language —to examine political communication from when Trump took office in his second presidency to the start of the Iran war—January 20, 2025 through February 28, 2026. I asked whether elite political language during this period reflects what Robert Putnam calls bonding social capital (inter -group reinforcement) or bridging social capital (cross-group connection), a dichotomy relevant to theory of democratic depolarization. To answer that, I scraped 16,707 documents —7,409 of Trump's Truth Social posts and 9,298 White House, State Department, and Department of Defense press releases —an d scored each one using Empath emotional categories and the Moral Foundations Dictionary 2.0. From those scores I derived a per -document Bridging Index combining Haidt's six moral foundations into a single bonding-versus-bridging measure. Composite scores are in early identical across institutional sources, but foundation - level profiles diverge sharply, and the variation between institutions turned out to be more diagnostic than the Trump-versus-government axis I expected to drive my findings.
Recommended Citation
Vera, Andrew, "Language and Polarization: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Political Communication During Trump's Second Term" (2026). IPHS 300: AI for Humanity. Paper 61.
https://digital.kenyon.edu/dh_iphs_ai/61
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.