Language patterns of outgroup prejudice.
Although explicit verbal expression of prejudice and stereotypes may have become less common due to the recent rise of social norms against prejudice, prejudice in language still persists in more subtle forms. It remains unclear whether and how language patterns predict variance in prejudice across...
| Published in: | Cognition Vol. 215 |
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| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | research Journal Article |
| Published: |
Elsevier B.V.
Oct2021
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=151814496&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 151814496 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 00100277 3H9 jtl: Cognition issn: 00100277 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Oct2021 vid: 215 pid: 1004 pub: Elsevier B.V. artinfo: ui: 151814496 151814496 NLM34192608 151814496 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104813 NLM34192608 151814496 ppct: 1 formats: tig: atl: Language patterns of outgroup prejudice. aug: au: Li, Ying T. Hills, Thomas Hills, Thomas affil: Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany sug: subj: Language Prejudice Human Politics Group Processes Comparative Studies Multicenter Studies Evaluation Research Validation Studies ab: Although explicit verbal expression of prejudice and stereotypes may have become less common due to the recent rise of social norms against prejudice, prejudice in language still persists in more subtle forms. It remains unclear whether and how language patterns predict variance in prejudice across a large number of minority groups. Informed by construal level theory, intergroup-contact theory, and linguistic expectancy bias, we leverage a natural language corpus of 1.8 million newspaper articles to investigate patterns of language referencing 60 U.S. minority groups. We found that perception of social distance among immigrant groups is reflected in language production: Groups perceived as socially distant (vs. close) are also more likely to be mentioned in abstract (vs. concrete) language. Concreteness was also strongly positively correlated with sentiment, a phenomenon that was unique to language concerning minority groups, suggesting a strong tendency for more socially distant groups to be represented with more negative language. We also provide a qualitative exploration of the content of outgroup prejudice by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation to language referencing minority groups in the context of immigration. We identified 15 immigrant-related topics (e.g., politics, arts, crime, illegal workers, museums, food) and the strength of their association and relationship with perceived sentiment for each minority group. This research demonstrates how perceived social distance and language concreteness are related and correlate with outgroup negativity, provides a practical and ecologically valid method for investigating perceptions of minority groups in language, and helps elaborate the connection between theoretical positions from social psychology with recent studies from computer science on prejudice embedded in natural language. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: research Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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