Brough, Jessica;
Harris, Lasana T;
Wu, Shi Hui;
Branigan, Holly P;
Rabagliati, Hugh;
(2024)
Cognitive causes of 'like me' race and gender biases in human language production.
Nature Human Behaviour
, 8
pp. 1706-1715.
10.1038/s41562-024-01943-3.
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Abstract
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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Cognitive causes of 'like me' race and gender biases in human language production |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41562-024-01943-3 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01943-3 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Human behaviour, Language and linguistics |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10197980 |
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