Many aspects of behavior are guided by dispositions that are relatively durable once formed. Political opinions and phonology, for instance, change largely through cohort succession. But evidence for cohort effects has been scarce in artistic and intellectual history; researchers in those fields more commonly explain change as an immediate response to recent innovations and events. We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,830 works of fiction from 1880 to 1999 and find that slightly more than half (54.7 percent) of the variance explained by time is explained better by an author’s year of birth than by a book’s year of publication. Writing practices do change across an author’s career. But the pace of change declines steeply with age. This finding suggests that existing histories of literary culture have a large blind spot: the early experiences that form cohorts are pivotal but leave few traces in the historical record.

中文翻译：

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队列继承解释了文学文化的最大变化

行为的许多方面都是由一旦形成就相对持久的性格所引导的。例如，政治观点和音系学在很大程度上通过队列继承而改变。但在艺术和思想史上，队列效应的证据很少。这些领域的研究人员更普遍地将变化解释为对最近的创新和事件的直接反应。我们在 1880 年至 1999 年的 10,830 部小说的语料库中检验了这些相互矛盾的变化理论，发现用时间解释的方差中，略多于一半 (54.7%) 的作者出生年份比书籍年份更能解释的出版。写作实践确实会在作者的职业生涯中发生变化。但随着年龄的增长，变化的速度急剧下降。这一发现表明，现有的文学文化史有一个很大的盲点：