I forgot to mention that the idea for this paper had its genesis one night during grad school when I couldn't sleep and I decided to indulge in this video by @DavidDeutschOxf. still blows my mind. The first five minutes are 🔥🔥🔥

If you want to read more and don't have access, the read-only version of the paper is here:

What do you want to know?.

From coordination, cooperation and collaboration to conflict, competition and disruptive innovation, the structure of information in language may impact the character, success and failure of human collectives by weaving the texture of their communication.

The structure of conceptual information within language shapes not only individual cognition but also how humans communicate and interact with one another, influencing the space of what collectives think and how they behave.

Our findings call for an expansion of the linguistic relativity hypothesis beyond the cognitive framework, bringing the idea into the realm of communication, social interaction, collaboration and collective action.

Surprisingly, we found that collective knowledge outputs reflect the same conceptual dynamics found in the conversations that produced them, with informationally denser languages producing conceptually narrower Wikipedia articles.

Fourth, we traced how individuals traversed the conceptual space of a language in conversation, using text from over 6,000 real-life conversations in 14 languages, finding that convos in informationally denser languages cover a narrower conceptual range across all conversations.

Third, we found support for the information-theoretic expectation that representing conceptual information more densely, as higher information density languages do, will be related to faster communication.

This means that the more languages pack information into their words, the closer concepts and ideas are to each other across the entire space of the language, as described here in two dimensions.

Second, across 18 knowledge domains (including government, technology, medicine, and entertainment), we show that this language information density is associated with a denser configuration of semantic information.

First, using a large-scale sample of 998 languages representing 101 language families and a broad diversity of knowledge domains, we found substantial variation in linguistic information density across the world’s languages.

We ask whether the structure of the world's languages might be related to patterns of communication, conversation, and collective exposition. The answer, unsurprisingly given this tweet, turns out to be yes.

So excited to share that my new paper with @profjamesevans, “Human languages with greater information density have higher communication speed but lower conversation breadth” is out today in @NatureHumBehav ( @JHUCarey.

RT @GretaThunberg: yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.

Please join me in congratulating Shirley Tang @tangtangxiaoli from Washington University in St Louis, RUNNER-UP of the 30th ⁦@INFORMS⁩ ⁦@OrganizationSci⁩ Best Dissertation Proposal Competition for her great work on the transparency dilemma!!!

Please join me in congratulating Michael Park ⁦@michae1park⁩ from the University of Minnesota, WINNER of the 30th ⁦@INFORMS⁩ ⁦@OrganizationSci⁩ Best Dissertation Proposal Competition for his great work on the politics of innovation!!!

Reuben Hurst (University of Michigan) @ReubenHurst2 ended a great day of presentations with his dissertation: Combatting Sociopolitical Stigma with Countervailing Claims: Evidence from Charlottesville. ⁦@OrganizationSci⁩

Sukhun Kang (London Business School) @SukhunKang talking about his dissertation: Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear: The Role of Public Scientific Maps in Organizational Search.

Shirley Tang (Washington University in St Louis) @tangtangxiaoli presenting her dissertation: The Transparency Dilemma: Competition, Innovation, And Organizational Performance with Corporate Transparency. ⁦@OrganizationSci⁩

Amisha Miller (Boston University) @amishamiller discussing her dissertation: Changing the System, Not the Seeker: How Can Investment Organizations Evaluate Novel Ideas without Overlooking the Ideas of Underrepresented Innovators? ⁦@OrganizationSci⁩