The Rise Of Vibe

Most of the words that make up a language lead relatively sedate lives and rarely call attention to themselves. This is not, however, the case with “vibe.” It has undergone several transformations, and its use may be a telling reflection of contemporary culture. The vibe concept was popularized by the Beach Boys’ song “Good Vibrations,” which was released in 1966. The counterculture megahit elevated a niche bit of psychedelic drug slang into a synonym for a positive atmosphere. Its shortened form, “good vibes,” has become a common way to refer to positive feelings.

But the rise of vibe can also be connected to a long-running controversy concerning the primacy of emotion over cognition. The social psychologist Robert Zajonc was well known for making this argument; in a frequently cited article, he claimed that “Preferences need no inferences”. One consequence of this is that “People may doubt their beliefs, but they . . . never doubt their feelings But why should this be? Part of the reason could be that feelings are simply more salient or memorable than facts. 

According to a quotation frequently attributed to Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” A predilection for trusting one’s feelings over facts may make sense in a culture that increasingly views facts as subjective or distorted by ideological bias.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, provides a good example of this trend. Founded in 2001, the site explicitly attempts to maintain a neutral point of view on controversial topics. Despite this policy, the alleged biases of Wikipedia’s editors have led to the creation of alternatives. This distrust of facts seems likely to continue, as it becomes increasingly difficult to know which sources of information can be trusted. 

Misinformation, claims of fake news, and conspiracy theories can quickly go viral on social media. A tendency for feelings to overwhelm facts can have important consequences. During the summer of 2022, for example, the economy was objectively in good shape: the nation’s GDP was strong, and unemployment was low. But in the aftermath of the pandemic, a spike in inflation led many people to view the economy negatively. To describe this disconnect, the financial commentator Kyla Scanlon coined the term “vibecession.”

Scanlon characterised this development as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and commentators weighed in to educate the public. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, for example, published a series of opinion pieces in The New York Times in which he decried the public’s sour attitude in the face of positive economic indicators. Nevertheless, the vibecession was seen as playing a role in Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024.

Vibe has proven to be unusually productive and has made the leap to other parts of speech. As a verb, The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “to get positive feelings from” (as in “vibing on the music” or “vibing to the beat”). It is also used to mean “getting along well,” often followed by “with”. 

And vibe continues to spin off new variants. Some recent examples include an assessment of feelings (as in "vibe check") or a change in feelings (as in "vibe shift"). The latest manifestation of the term is “vibe coding.”  The editors define it as “the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist the writing of computer code.” Clearly, vibe has become a productive term in 21st-century America—but it may also be emblematic of our shifting views about feelings and about whom and what we trust.

- Psychology Today