Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, UK.
Cognition. 2021 Oct;215:104813. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104813. Epub 2021 Jun 27.
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.
尽管由于最近反偏见社会规范的兴起，明确表达偏见和刻板印象的言语可能变得不那么常见，但语言中的偏见仍然以更微妙的形式存在。目前还不清楚语言模式是否以及如何预测大量少数群体之间的偏见差异。受构念水平理论、群体间接触理论和语言期望偏差的启发，我们利用一个包含 180 万篇报纸文章的自然语言语料库，调查了 60 个美国少数群体的语言参照模式。我们发现，移民群体的社会距离感知反映在语言生成中：被认为社会距离较远（而非较近）的群体更有可能用抽象（而非具体）的语言来提及。具体性也与情绪呈强烈正相关，这种现象仅存在于少数群体的语言中，表明社会距离较远的群体更倾向于用更负面的语言来描述。我们还通过在移民背景下应用潜在狄利克雷分配（Latent Dirichlet Allocation）来探讨对少数群体的偏见内容，对其进行了定性探讨。我们确定了 15 个与移民相关的话题（如政治、艺术、犯罪、非法劳工、博物馆、食物），以及它们与每个少数群体的感知情绪的关联和关系强度。这项研究展示了感知的社会距离和语言具体性是如何相关的，以及它们如何与对少数群体的负面看法相关，为用语言研究对少数群体的看法提供了一种实用且具有生态有效性的方法，并有助于阐述社会心理学理论立场与计算机科学最近关于自然语言中嵌入的偏见的研究之间的联系。
