Conceptual frameworks such as religion or politics may play
a pervasive role in people’s interpretation of experience, but
the empirical evidence for such effects is limited. To the
extent that conceptual frameworks are real, they should have
a pervasive impact on how people talk about the world. Such
an influence may be detected in people’s everyday language.
In a series of studies, text from the social media platform
Reddit was used to train machine learning classifiers to
identify people’s association with a particular religion or
mental disorder. Impressively, classifiers trained on text
focusing on religion and mental disorders could be used to
identify people’s association with a particular religion or
mental disorder even when the text was not explicitly about
these topics, such as when it was about buying a car or
playing tennis. Not only could the classifiers predict people’s
religion or mental illness in the present, they could also do so
prospectively, indicating that people’s everyday language
gives away information about the kinds of conceptual
frameworks they may hold in the future. An analysis of the
features learned by the classifier suggested that they learned
features with high face validity for the underlying conceptual
framework. Together, the results provide evidence for the
existence of conceptual frameworks by virtue of the imprint
they leave across a wide range of language contexts.