  It was recently suggested in a study published in Nature Human Behaviour that
the historical loosening of American culture was associated with a trade-off
between higher creativity and lower order. To this end, Jackson et al. generate
a linguistic index of cultural tightness based on the Google Books Ngram corpus
and use this index to show that American norms loosened between 1800 and 2000.
While we remain agnostic toward a potential loosening of American culture and a
statistical association with creativity/order, we show here that the methods
used by Jackson et al. are neither suitable for testing the validity of the
index nor for establishing possible relationships with creativity/order.
