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Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep
In everyday language, concepts appear alongside (i.e., collocate with) related concepts. Societal biases often emerge in these collocations; e.g., female (vs. male) names collocate with art- (vs. science-) related concepts, and African American (vs. White American) names collocate with negative (vs....
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2022
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9234450/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35769747 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.871221 |
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author | Hauser, David J. Schwarz, Norbert |
author_facet | Hauser, David J. Schwarz, Norbert |
author_sort | Hauser, David J. |
collection | PubMed |
description | In everyday language, concepts appear alongside (i.e., collocate with) related concepts. Societal biases often emerge in these collocations; e.g., female (vs. male) names collocate with art- (vs. science-) related concepts, and African American (vs. White American) names collocate with negative (vs. positive) concepts. It is unknown whether such collocations merely reflect societal biases or contribute to them. Concepts that are themselves neutral in valence but nevertheless collocate with valenced concepts provide a unique opportunity to address this question. For example, when asked, most people evaluate the concept “cause” as neutral, but “cause” is frequently followed by negative concepts (e.g., death, pain, and trouble). We use such semantically prosodic concepts to test the influence of collocation on the emergence of implicit bias: do neutral concepts that frequently collocate with valenced concepts have corresponding implicit bias? In evaluative priming tasks, participants evaluated positive/negative nouns (Study 1) or pictures (Study 2) after seeing verb primes that were (a) strongly valenced (e.g., hate and comfort), (b) neutral in valence but collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., ease and gain), or (c) neutral in valence and not collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., reply and describe). Throughout, neutral primes with positive (negative) collocates facilitated the evaluation of positive (negative) targets much like strongly valenced primes, whereas neutral primes without valenced collocates did not. That neutral concepts with valenced collocates parallel the influence of valenced concepts suggests that their collocations in natural language may be sufficient for fostering implicit bias. Societal implications of the causal embedding hypothesis are discussed. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9234450 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-92344502022-06-28 Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep Hauser, David J. Schwarz, Norbert Front Psychol Psychology In everyday language, concepts appear alongside (i.e., collocate with) related concepts. Societal biases often emerge in these collocations; e.g., female (vs. male) names collocate with art- (vs. science-) related concepts, and African American (vs. White American) names collocate with negative (vs. positive) concepts. It is unknown whether such collocations merely reflect societal biases or contribute to them. Concepts that are themselves neutral in valence but nevertheless collocate with valenced concepts provide a unique opportunity to address this question. For example, when asked, most people evaluate the concept “cause” as neutral, but “cause” is frequently followed by negative concepts (e.g., death, pain, and trouble). We use such semantically prosodic concepts to test the influence of collocation on the emergence of implicit bias: do neutral concepts that frequently collocate with valenced concepts have corresponding implicit bias? In evaluative priming tasks, participants evaluated positive/negative nouns (Study 1) or pictures (Study 2) after seeing verb primes that were (a) strongly valenced (e.g., hate and comfort), (b) neutral in valence but collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., ease and gain), or (c) neutral in valence and not collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., reply and describe). Throughout, neutral primes with positive (negative) collocates facilitated the evaluation of positive (negative) targets much like strongly valenced primes, whereas neutral primes without valenced collocates did not. That neutral concepts with valenced collocates parallel the influence of valenced concepts suggests that their collocations in natural language may be sufficient for fostering implicit bias. Societal implications of the causal embedding hypothesis are discussed. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-06-13 /pmc/articles/PMC9234450/ /pubmed/35769747 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.871221 Text en Copyright © 2022 Hauser and Schwarz. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Hauser, David J. Schwarz, Norbert Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep |
title | Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep |
title_full | Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep |
title_fullStr | Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep |
title_full_unstemmed | Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep |
title_short | Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep |
title_sort | implicit bias reflects the company that words keep |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9234450/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35769747 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.871221 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT hauserdavidj implicitbiasreflectsthecompanythatwordskeep AT schwarznorbert implicitbiasreflectsthecompanythatwordskeep |