School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, UK.
Nat Hum Behav. 2024 Sep;8(9):1706-1715. doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-01943-3. Epub 2024 Jul 31.
Natural language contains and communicates social biases, often reflecting attitudes, prejudices and stereotypes. Here we provide evidence for a novel psychological pathway for the expression of such biases, in which they arise as a consequence of the automatized mechanisms by which humans retrieve words to produce sentences. Four experiments show that, when describing events, speakers tend to mention people who are more like them first and, thus, tend to highlight the perspectives of their own social groups. This 'like me' effect was seen in speakers from multiple demographic groups, in both English and Chinese speakers and in both first- and second-language English speakers. Psycholinguistic manipulations pinpoint that the bias is caused by greater accessibility in memory of words that refer to in-group than out-group members. These data provide a new cognitive explanation for why people produce biased language and highlight how detailed cognitive theories can have social implications.
自然语言中包含并传递着社会偏见，这些偏见往往反映了态度、偏见和刻板印象。在这里，我们提供了一种新的心理途径来表达这种偏见的证据，即它们是人类在生成句子时自动检索单词的机制的结果。四项实验表明，在描述事件时，说话者往往首先提到与自己更相似的人，从而倾向于突出自己所在社会群体的观点。这种“像我一样”的效应在来自多个不同群体的说话者中都有体现，包括英语和汉语使用者，以及以英语为第一语言和第二语言的使用者。心理语言学的操控实验明确指出，这种偏见是由于与内群体成员相比，记忆中内群体成员的词汇更易被激活所致。这些数据为人们产生有偏见的语言提供了一个新的认知解释，并强调了详细的认知理论如何具有社会意义。
