Novels See Only Politics Changed By Facts

To study perceptions of causes of cultural change, I started with this posted list of the top 240 novels ever. I then asked (paid versions of) three LLMs to, for each novel, see if a main character is shown to have a stance of support or opposition to some social movement, and if so to pick the most central character like this. Re this set of novel characters, I ask what %-political (vs cultural) was the movement, how the character’s stance re it changed in the novel, and to pick from 8 possible causes of change.

Out of the 240 novels, ChatGPT found 9, Gemini found 35, and Claude found 99 where characters took a stance re a social movement. Of these, 5, 15, and 61, respectively, characters changed their stance. So the LLMs had rather different standards re how to decide those.

Their median movement-%-politics estimate was 85%, 80%, and 58%, respectively. For novels where the character changed their stance, those medians were 90%, 100% and 54%. The fraction of novels with a movement where it was <20% political is 0%, 3%, and 6%. That 3% is one novel, Don Quixote, while the 6% are On the Road, The Age of Innocence, Confessions, Brideshead Revisited, The End of the Affair, and The House of Mirth.

The fraction of characters whose stance changed who came more to support their movement was 80%, 40%, 34%. And “seeing unexpected events or facts in the world” was said to cause their stance change in 100%, 77%, and 82% of cases where a cause was identified. The next most common cause was “Change resolved inconsistency in prior norms”, at 0%, 15%, 7%. Here are the other 4 possible specific causes that LLMs rarely thought described novels:

• Saw opportunity to gain power, status, attention

• Saw prior associate or prestigious model change, copied them,

• Gained new associates or prestigious models, copied them

• It just felt right

Thus top novels are overwhelmingly focused on political, not cultural, change, and on change driven by characters seeing unexpected things in the world, and not driven by feelings, consistency, or copying associates. Typical real process of cultural change seem largely invisible to top novel authors.