Language use in intergroup contexts: The linguistic intergroup bias

A psycholinguistic study of intergroup bias and its cultural propagation

Intergroup bias is the tendency for people to inflate positive regard for their in-group and derogate the out-group. Across two online experiments (N = 922) this study revisits the methodological premises of research on language as a window into intergroup bias. Experiment 1 examined (i) whether the valence (positivity) of language production differs when communicating about an in- vs. out-group, and (ii) whether the extent of this bias is influenced by the positivity of input descriptors that were initially presented to participants as examples of how an in-group or out-group characterize themselves. Experiment 2 used the linear diffusion chain method to examine how biases are transmitted through cultural generations. Valence of verbal descriptions were quantified using ratings obtained from a large-scale psycholinguistic database. The findings from Experiment 1 indicated a bias towards employing positive language in describing the in-group (exhibiting in-group favoritism), particularly in cases where the input descriptors were negative. However, there was weak evidence for increased negativity aimed at the out-group (i.e., out-group derogation). The findings from Experiment 2 demonstrated that in-group positivity bias propagated across cultural generations at a higher rate than out-group derogation. The results shed light on the formation and cultural transmission of intergroup bias.

Can generative AI infer thinking style from language? Evaluating the utility of AI as a psychological text analysis tool

Generative AI, short for Generative Artificial Intelligence, a class of artificial intelligence systems, is not currently the choice technology for text analysis, but prior work suggests it may have some utility to assess dynamics like emotion. The current work builds upon this empirical foundation to consider how analytic thinking scores from a large language model chatbot, ChatGPT, were linked to analytic thinking scores from dictionary-based tools like Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Using over 16,000 texts from four samples and tested against three prompts and two large language models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4), the evidence suggests there were small associations between ChatGPT and LIWC analytic thinking scores (meta-analytic effect sizes: .058 < rs < .304; ps < .001). When given the formula to calculate the LIWC analytic thinking index, ChatGPT performed incorrect mathematical operations in 22% of the cases, suggesting basic word and number processing may be unreliable with large language models. Researchers should be cautious when using AI for text analysis.

Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases

One of the essential insights from psychological research is that people's information processing is often biased. By now, a number of different biases have been identified and empirically demonstrated. Unfortunately, however, these biases have often been examined in separate lines of research, thereby precluding the recognition of shared principles. Here we argue that several-so far mostly unrelated-biases (e.g., bias blind spot, hostile media bias, egocentric/ethnocentric bias, outcome bias) can be traced back to the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans' tendency toward belief-consistent information processing. What varies between different biases is essentially the specific belief that guides information processing. More importantly, we propose that different biases even share the same underlying belief and differ only in the specific outcome of information processing that is assessed (i.e., the dependent variable), thus tapping into different manifestations of the same latent information processing. In other words, we propose for discussion a model that suffices to explain several different biases. We thereby suggest a more parsimonious approach compared with current theoretical explanations of these biases. We also generate novel hypotheses that follow directly from the integrative nature of our perspective.

Investigating the Relationship between Resident Physician Implicit Bias and Language Use during a Clinical Encounter with Hispanic Patients

Prior research suggests that the implicit biases of physicians are negatively associated with quality of medical care and patient satisfaction among minority patients. However, relatively little is known about how physicians express these subtle forms of bias in patient interactions. This study examined the implicit and explicit anti-Hispanic biases of 53 resident physicians and the relationship between anti-Hispanic bias and language use during outpatient medical appointments with 291 Hispanic patients. Physician implicit bias was positively associated with use of interrogatives and work-related words and negatively associated with the use of prepositions and relativity-related words (e.g., words related to time and the future). These findings contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting that, in addition to nonverbal and paraverbal behaviors, providers may communicate implicit bias to patients through the words they use during a clinical visit.

Abstract concepts: external influences, internal constraints, and methodological issues

There is a longstanding and widely held misconception about the relative remoteness of abstract concepts from concrete experiences. This review examines the current evidence for external influences and internal constraints on the processing, representation, and use of abstract concepts, like truth, friendship, and number. We highlight the theoretical benefit of distinguishing between grounded and embodied cognition and then ask which roles do perception, action, language, and social interaction play in acquiring, representing and using abstract concepts. By reviewing several studies, we show that they are, against the accepted definition, not detached from perception and action. Focussing on magnitude-related concepts, we also discuss evidence for cultural influences on abstract knowledge and explore how internal processes such as inner speech, metacognition, and inner bodily signals (interoception) influence the acquisition and retrieval of abstract knowledge. Finally, we discuss some methodological developments. Specifically, we focus on the importance of studies that investigate the time course of conceptual processing and we argue that, because of the paramount role of sociality for abstract concepts, new methods are necessary to study concepts in interactive situations. We conclude that bodily, linguistic, and social constraints provide important theoretical limitations for our theories of conceptual knowledge.

Our issue or their issue? Media coverage and framing of the Zika virus epidemic

How does the news media respond to health emergencies abroad? Between 2015 and 2018, Zika virus spread rapidly throughout Latin America before arriving in the continental United States. Despite the risks to adults and newborns, it is unclear how media coverage developed and framed the threat for its audience. In this paper, we argue that while the frequency of coverage was responsive to infections, its content failed to promote proactive health behaviour. To assess these claims, we analyse each of 442 articles dealing with Zika virus published by The New York Times from 2015-18. We find that the amount of coverage reflected infections but did not change once the disease emerged in the US. Furthermore, content analysis using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software reveals that coverage emphasised differences between communities (those affected and those at home) and that present and past time orientations dominated coverage as opposed to future time orientations.

One Fee, Two Fees; Red Fee, Blue Fee: People Use the Valence of Others’ Speech in Social Relational Judgments

We present an empirical demonstration that people rely on linguistic valence as a direct cue to a speaker’s group membership. Members of the U.S. voting public judge positive words as more likely to be spoken by members of their political in-group, and negative words as more likely to be spoken by members of their political out-group (three studies with 655 participants). We further find that participants perceive pluralized forms of nouns as more extremely valenced than singular forms (one study with 280 participants). This allowed us to control for the semantic content of words while eliciting systematic differences in the source attributions made by partisans. Our work contributes to both theory and methodology used to understand the linguistic cues people use to make social relational judgments.

Ingroup Bias in Healthcare Contexts: Israeli-Jewish Perceptions of Arab and Jewish Doctors

The influence of group membership on perceptions of outgroup members has been extensively studied in various contexts. This research has indicated a strong tendency for ingroup bias – preferring the ingroup over the outgroup. We seek to further expand on the growing literature regarding the effects of group membership within healthcare contexts. Focusing on the Arab-Jewish context in Israel, the present study explored the influence of group membership on Israeli-Jewish participants’ evaluations when exposed to potential malpractice. Specifically, participants (n = 165) read a description of an Israeli-Jewish or Israeli-Arab physician who was either culpable or non-culpable of malpractice. Consistent with our predictions, findings generally indicated more negative evaluations of the Israeli-Arab physician, regardless of objective culpability. We conclude by discussing the study’s limitations and implications.

Spring Break or Heart Break? Extending Valence Bias to Emotional Words

Ambiguous stimuli are useful for assessing emotional bias. For example, surprised faces could convey a positive or negative meaning, and the degree to which an individual interprets these expressions as positive or negative represents their "valence bias." Currently, the most well-validated ambiguous stimuli for assessing valence bias include nonverbal signals (faces and scenes), overlooking an inherent ambiguity in verbal signals. This study identified 32 words with dual-valence ambiguity (i.e., relatively high intersubject variability in valence ratings and relatively slow response times) and length-matched clearly valenced words (16 positive, 16 negative). Preregistered analyses demonstrated that the words-based valence bias correlated with the bias for faces, r _s (213) = .27, p < .001, and scenes, r _s (204) = .46, p < .001. That is, the same people who interpret ambiguous faces/scenes as positive also interpret ambiguous words as positive. These findings provide a novel tool for measuring valence bias and greater generalizability, resulting in a more robust measure of this bias.

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 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.

Prejudice in disguise: Which features determine the subtlety of ethnically prejudicial statements?

In current immigration debates ethnic prejudice is often expressed in a subtle manner, which conceals its xenophobic content. However, previous research has only insufficiently examined the specific features that make certain ethnically prejudicial statements subtler, i.e., less readily identifiable as xenophobic, than others. The current study employs an experimental factorial survey design and assesses the subtlety of systematically manipulated prejudicial statements. Our data from a German random population sample (N = 895) indicate that the subtlety of ethnically prejudicial statements is manipulable along the dimensions of topic, linguistic (essentialist) phrasing, and target group: Prejudicial statements that refer to culture, that are phrased weakly essentialistically, and that target Muslims were subtlest, in being evaluated as least xenophobic by the respondents. Moreover, with an increasing internal and a decreasing external motivation to respond without prejudice, individuals reacted more strongly to the variation of the statements’ topic and linguistic phrasing and were thus more sensitive to features determining subtler and more blatant ways of ethnic prejudice expression. These findings contribute to a better understanding of current migration discourses, in demonstrating that the specific manner in which ethnic prejudice is communicated can camouflage the xenophobic nature of a statement, so that it is less readily recognized as prejudicial.

Multilingualism and Ethnic Prejudice

Abstract. This study explored the relationship between the ability to talk to others in more than one language and ethnic prejudice, considering the quality and quantity of intergroup contact. A structural equation model analysis was carried out on a sample of 631 Italian citizens. The results showed that multilingualism led to an increase of acceptance of intergroup differences and positive attitudes toward Moroccans and that the quality (but not quantity) of intergroup contact-mediated those relationships. The mediating role of the quality of intergroup contact extends previous results on the relationship between multilingualism and positive attitudes toward ethnic out-groups. These findings are important from a scientific point of view, as they enrich the conditions of the intergroup contact hypothesis.

Verb Intergroup Bias: Verbs Are Used More Often in Reference to In-Groups than Out-Groups

Agency is a basic dimension of evaluations of social groups. More agency is assigned to in-groups than to out-groups, and verb intergroup bias (VIB) captures this tendency in language use. Four studies that performed large-scale quantitative analysis of natural language use, which covered more than 200 billion words, 20 countries, and various time spans, support the VIB model. Verbs, which are prototypically associated with actions, serve as agency indicators, and thus generic in-groups are more often described with verbs ( we vs. they). Moreover, VIB is present in specific between-group comparisons: for Americans as an in-group reference and various out-groups (e.g., Mexicans, Russians, and Palestinians), as well as for Americans, Canadians, Britons, and Australians as in-group references and immigrants as a generic out-group. VIB is a useful tool in diagnosing intergroup discourses. Furthermore, VIB attests to the importance of analyzing language’s role in the formation and maintenance of social biases.

Implicit Social Cognition

In the last 20 years, research on implicit social cognition has established that social judgments and behavior are guided by attitudes and stereotypes of which the actor may lack awareness. Research using the methods of implicit social cognition has produced the concept of implicit bias, which has generated wide attention not only in social, clinical, and developmental psychology, but also in disciplines outside of psychology, including business, law, criminal justice, medicine, education, and political science. Although this rapidly growing body of research offers prospects of useful societal applications, the theory needed to confidently guide those applications remains insufficiently developed. This article describes the methods that have been developed, the findings that have been obtained, and the theoretical questions that remain to be answered.

Seeing bias in irony: How recipients infer speakers’ stereotypes from their ironic remarks about social-category members

We study whether recipients draw inferences about speakers’ stereotypic impressions from their ironic (vs. literal) remarks. Following up on the Irony Bias, we conducted two experiments in which participants were exposed (in writing or sound-recording) to only either literal remarks or irony referring to either positive or negative behaviors of an unknown social category. Results of both experiments show that participants recognize speakers’ biased impressions from their pattern of irony use. When speakers made ironic remarks about category members’ positive behaviors (but not about negative behaviors), participants inferred that speakers had a more negative impression of the category, and that they perceived higher essentialism of negative (vs. positive) behaviors. The impression participants perceived in speakers’ biased communication pattern did not translate to participants’ own reported category impression. We discuss various factors that may determine when a recognized stereotypic view in a speaker contributes to the formation and maintenance of stereotypic impressions.

What Do Providers Want from a Pain Screening Measure Used in Daily Practice?

Objectives

We aimed to understand providers' experiences and preferences regarding several brief pain screening measures.

Methods

We collected two waves of data for this analysis. Wave one: We conducted nine focus groups with multidisciplinary Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) providers. Wave two: To understand an emergent theme in wave one, we conducted 15 telephone interviews with prescribing providers where we used a semistructured guide comparing screening measures currently used in VA practices. Using content analysis of the wave two interviews, we evaluated providers' perceptions of important aspects of brief pain screening measures and reported emergent themes.

Results

Five emergent themes underlie providers' perceptions of the utility of brief pain screening measures: 1) item abstractness: how bounded and concrete a patient's interpretation of an individual item is; 2) item distinctness: belief in the patient's ability to differentiate between the meaning of various items in a pain measure; 3) item anchoring: presence of a description under each response option making the meaning explicit; 4) item look-back period: the period of time over which patients are asked to remember and comment on their pain; 5) parsimony: identifying the shortest and simplest approach possible to acquire desired information.

Conclusions

Overly complex or adaptive screening tools may include information that is ultimately not used by providers. Conversely, overly simplistic pain screening tools may omit information that helps providers understand the impact of pain on patients' lives. As pain is nuanced, complex, and subjective, all screening measures exhibit some limitations. No single pain measure serves all chronic pain patients, and specific contexts or settings may warrant additional specific items.

The Mickey Mouse problem: Distinguishing religious and fictional counterintuitive agents

The Mickey Mouse problem refers to the difficulty in predicting which supernatural agents are capable of eliciting belief and religious devotion. We approached the problem directly by asking participants to invent a “religious” or a “fictional” agent with five supernatural abilities. Compared to fictional agents, religious agents were ascribed a higher proportion of abilities that violated folk psychology or that were ambiguous–violating nonspecific or multiple domains of folk knowledge–and fewer abilities that violated folk physics and biology. Similarly, participants rated folk psychology violations provided by the experimenter as more characteristic of religious agents than were violations of folk physics or folk biology, while fictional agents showed no clear pattern. Religious agents were also judged as more potentially beneficial, and more ambivalent (i.e., similar ratings of benefit and harm), than fictional agents, regardless of whether the agents were invented or well-known to participants. Together, the results support a motivational account of religious belief formation that is facilitated by these biases.

Measuring Abstract Mind-Sets Through Syntax: Automating the Linguistic Category Model

Abstraction in language has critical implications for memory, judgment, and learning and can provide an important window into a person’s cognitive abstraction level. The linguistic category model (LCM) provides one well-validated, human-coded approach to quantifying linguistic abstraction. In this article, we leverage the LCM to construct the Syntax-LCM, a computer-automated method which quantifies syntax use that indicates abstraction levels. We test the Syntax-LCM’s accuracy for approximating hand-coded LCM scores and validate that it differentiates between text intended for a distal or proximal message recipient (previously linked with shifts in abstraction). We also consider existing automated methods for quantifying linguistic abstraction and find that the Syntax-LCM most consistently approximates LCM scores across contexts. We discuss practical and theoretical implications of these findings.

The principle of consistency and the cause and function of behaviour

At all levels of information processing in the brain, neural and cognitive structures tend towards a state of consistency. When two or more simultaneously active cognitive structures are logically inconsistent, arousal is increased, which activates processes with the expected consequence of increasing consistency and decreasing arousal. Increased arousal is experienced as aversive, while the expected or actual decrease in arousal as a result of increased consistency is experienced as rewarding. Modes of resolution of inconsistency can be divided into purely cognitive solutions, such as changing an attitude or an associated motor plan, and behavioural solutions, such as exploration, aggression, fear, and feeding. Models and theories consistent with the principle of consistency are numerous, have a long and continuing history, and come from many different scientific fields, such as social psychology, perception, neurocognition, learning, motor control, system control, ethology, and stress. The present paper presents a brief overview of relevant information from these fields of research, while focusing mainly on the implications of the principle of consistency for the understanding of the cause and function of behaviour. Based on this overview, it is proposed that all behaviour involving cognitive processing is caused by the activation of inconsistent cognitions and functions to increase perceived consistency.

From I to We: Group formation and linguistic adaption in an online xenophobic forum

Much of identity formation processes nowadays takes place online, indicating that intergroup differentiation may be found in online communities. This paper focuses on identity formation processes in an open online xenophobic, anti-immigrant, discussion forum. Open discussion forums provide an excellent opportunity to investigate open interactions that may reveal how identity is formed and how individual users are influenced by other users. Using computational text analysis and Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), our results show that new users change from an individual identification to a group identification over time as indicated by a decrease in the use of “I” and increase in the use of “we”. The analyses also show increased use of “they” indicating intergroup differentiation. Moreover, the linguistic style of new users became more similar to that of the overall forum over time. Further, the emotional content decreased over time. The results indicate that new users on a forum create a collective identity with the other users and adapt to them linguistically.

The Developmental Origins of Dehumanization

Dehumanization is a complex social phenomenon, intimately connected to intergroup harm and neglect. However, developmental research has only recently started to investigate this important topic. In this chapter, we review research in areas closely related to dehumanization including children's intergroup preferences, essentialist conceptions of social groups, and understanding of relative status. We then highlight the small number of recent studies that have investigated the development of this social bias more directly. We close by making a series of suggestions for future research that will enable us to better understand the nature and causes of this harmful phenomenon.

An inconclusive study comparing the effect of concrete and abstract descriptions of belief-inconsistent information

Linguistic bias is the differential use of linguistic abstraction (as defined by the Linguistic Category Model) to describe the same behaviour for members of different groups. Essentially, it is the tendency to use concrete language for belief-inconsistent behaviours and abstract language for belief-consistent behaviours. Having found that linguistic bias is produced without intention or awareness in many contexts, researchers argue that linguistic bias reflects, reinforces, and transmits pre-existing beliefs, thus playing a role in belief maintenance. Based on the Linguistic Category Model, this assumes that concrete descriptions reduce the impact of belief-inconsistent behaviours while abstract descriptions maximize the impact of belief-consistent behaviours. However, a key study by Geschke, Sassenberg, Ruhrmann, and Sommer [2007] found that concrete descriptions of belief-inconsistent behaviours actually had a greater impact than abstract descriptions, a finding that does not fit easily within the linguistic bias paradigm. Abstract descriptions (e.g. the elderly woman is athletic) are, by definition, more open to interpretation than concrete descriptions (e.g. the elderly woman works out regularly). It is thus possible that abstract descriptions are (1) perceived as having less evidentiary strength than concrete descriptions, and (2) understood in context (i.e. athletic for an elderly woman). In this study, the design of Geschke et al. [2007] was modified to address this possibility. We expected that the differences in the impact of concrete and abstract descriptions would be reduced or reversed, but instead we found that differences were largely absent. This study did not support the findings of Geschke et al. [2007] or the linguistic bias paradigm. We encourage further attempts to understand the strong effect of concrete descriptions for belief-inconsistent behaviour.

Positive imagined contact is actively chosen: Exploring determinants and consequences of volitional intergroup imagery in a conflict-ridden setting

Past research has ascertained the benefits of involuntary, “forced” exposure to positive imagined contact. This research explored determinants and consequences of actively chosen imagined contact in a setting of entrenched intergroup conflict. In Study 1, when given an unvalenced visualisation scenario enabling participants to steer the visualisation in any direction they wanted, Turkish Cypriots visualised an intergroup interaction nondistinguishable in quality to that of those assigned to a positive scenario. In Study 2, when asked to actively choose between visualising a positive or a negative intergroup interaction, Turkish Cypriots disproportionally preferred positive over negative contact. The chosen visualisation reflected mood and valenced confirmation biases and resulted in virtuous (vs. vicious) effects on group-level outcomes. These findings shed a first light on the psychological underpinnings of volitional intergroup imagery and indicate that intergroup imagery is a safe way of engaging with the outgroup even in contexts of entrenched conflict.

When Sugar-Coated Words Taste Dry: The Relationship between Gender, Anxiety, and Response to Irony

This article approaches the question of mocking compliments and ironic praise from an interactional gender perspective. A statement such as “You're a real genius!” could easily be interpreted as a literal compliment, as playful humor or as an offensive insult. We investigate this thin line in the use of irony among adult men and women. The research introduces an interactional approach to irony, through the lens of gender stereotype bias. The main question concerns the impact of individual differences and gender effect on the perception and production of ironic comments. Irony Processing Task (IPT), developed by Milanowicz (2016), was applied in order to study the production and perception of ironic criticism and ironic praise in adult males and females. It is a rare case of a study measuring the ability to create irony because, unlike most of known irony research, it is not a multiple choice test where participants are given the response options. The IPT was also used to assess the asymmetry of affect (humor vs. malice) and impact of gender effect in the perception of ironic comments. Results are analyzed in relation to the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) scores. The findings reveal the interactional relationship between gender and response to irony. Male responses were consistently more ironic than female's, across all experimental conditions, and female responses varied more. Both, men and women used more irony in response to male ironic criticism but female ironic praise. Anxiety proved to be a moderate predictor of irony comprehension and willingness to use irony. Data, collected in control and two gender stereotype activation conditions, also corroborates the assumption that the detection of compliments and the detection of criticism can be moderated by the attitude activation effect. The results are interpreted within the framework of linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) and natural selection strategies.

Gender biases and linguistic sexism in political communication: A comparison of press news about men and women Italian ministers

This research on press communication uses a synchronic perspective concerning eighteen ministers, balanced by gender, in the Renzi government (in 2014), as well as a diachronic perspective concerning women ministers from five governments (from 2006-2014). The governments in 2014 and of 2013 were predominantly center-left, with the participation of center and center-right parties, whereas the previous governments had technical-professional rather than political ministers (in 2011), center-right (in 2008), and center-left (in 2006) ministers. In the synchronic analysis we explored the different ways in which the ministers are named, the relative presence of sexist/non-sexist, agentive/non-agentive, and abstract/concrete language in which they were presented. The first analysis comprised 332 headlines and the second comprised 1,356 headlines; we conducted a numerical and lexicographical analysis on the headlines. The results showed: more coverage for men than for women; gender biases in naming ministers involving a greater number of citations of women with both first and last name, whereas there were a greater number of citations of men with their first name only; the prevalence of sexist language that uses the generic masculine rather than the specific feminine (that is, the grammatical feminization of a typically masculine form) in representing women; an increment of the specific feminine in representing women in the last three governments over the previous two; no gender differences in the use of “I” and “We” as markers of agency; more quotations of direct discourse for women than for men; language slightly more abstract than concrete, for both men and women; more positive adjectives for women, and more negative adjectives for men. The results are discussed in relation to the international literature and to the Italian cultural-political context.

Motivation alters impression formation and related neural systems

Observers frequently form impressions of other people based on complex or conflicting information. Rather than being objective, these impressions are often biased by observers’ motives. For instance, observers often downplay negative information they learn about ingroup members. Here, we characterize the neural systems associated with biased impression formation. Participants learned positive and negative information about ingroup and outgroup social targets. Following this information, participants worsened their impressions of outgroup, but not ingroup, targets. This tendency was associated with a failure to engage neural structures including lateral prefrontal cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, temporoparietal junction, Insula and Precuneus when processing negative information about ingroup (but not outgroup) targets. To the extent that participants engaged these regions while learning negative information about ingroup members, they exhibited less ingroup bias in their impressions. These data are consistent with a model of ‘effortless bias’, under which perceivers fail to process goal-inconsistent information in order to maintain desired conclusions.

Porous Chambers, Echoes of Valence and Stereotypes

Selective exposure to one-sided news coverage, especially of controversial geopolitical events, may contribute to growing social polarization. Existing research on “echo chambers”—fragmented information environments that amplify homogeneous perspectives—focuses on the degree to which individuals and social media platforms shape informational segregation. Here, we explore whether news organizations directly contribute to echo chambers through the hyperlinks they embed in online articles. Using network and text analysis, we examined coverage of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and found that online news media exhibited weak community structure and high connectivity across news outlets. However, analyses also indicated that media sources were more likely to link to coverage that was similar to their own in terms of emotional valence and stereotype-relevant aspects of the events. While hyperlinking to diverse news sources may ameliorate fragmented information environments, selectively linking to similar coverage may contribute to growing polarization.

What's in a Name? Evaluating the Effects of the "Sex Offender" Label on Public Opinions and Beliefs

Particularly over the past two decades, the terms sex offender and juvenile sex offender (JSO) have attained increasingly common usage in media and public policy discourse. Although often applied as factual descriptors, the labels may evoke strong subconscious associations with a population commonly presumed to be compulsive, at high risk of re-offense, and resistant to rehabilitation. Such associations, in turn, may exert considerable impact on expressions of support for certain policies as well as public beliefs and opinions about adults and youth who have perpetrated sexual offenses. The current study systematically evaluated the impact of the "sex offender" and "JSO" labels through series of items administered to a nationally stratified and matched sample from across the United States. The study employed an experimental design, in which one group of participants (n = 498) ranked their levels of agreement with a series of statements utilizing these labels, and a control group (n = 502) responded to a matched set of statements substituting the labels with more neutral descriptive language. Findings support the hypothesis that use of the "sex offender" label strengthens public support for policies directed at those who have perpetrated sexual crimes, including public Internet disclosure, residency restrictions, and social networking bans. The "JSO" label is demonstrated to produce particularly robust effects, enhancing support for policies that subject youth to public Internet notification and affecting beliefs about youths' propensity to re-offend as adults. Implications for public policy, media communication, and research are explored and discussed.

Implicit Attributions and Biases

In this final comment, we point out several misunderstandings in Edwards and Potter's (1999) rejoinder and defend the arguments advanced in our original critique. In addition, we make an attempt to clarify that a lexical approach to language and attribution, based on the Linguistic Category Model (LCM), cannot be reduced to a lexical coding scheme. Rather, the LCM places numerous theoretical constraints on attribution, most of which have been tested and substantiated in many studies ignored in Edwards and Potter's articles. We point out in particular how the LCM can deal with the the sequential, contextualized, interaction oriented nature of conversation.

A Parsimonious Theory Can Account for Complex Phenomena

A strong case was made by Edwards and Potter (1993) that discourse analysis is superior to alternative approaches to language analysis. In the present article we apply four models of language analysis to Edwards and Potter's paper, including our Linguistic Category Model (LCM) and their Discursive Action Model (DAM), with converging results. It is concluded that a complex phenomenon like real language in social context does not necessarily need models and methods approaching the same level of complexity. A more parsimonious model can be even better suited to the task.

Increasing Group Entitativity

Previous research has shown the strength of the linguistic intergroup bias across different intergroup settings. However, there is no evidence of linguistic discrimination within minimal groups. This experiment aimed to shed light on the phenomenon of linguistic intergroup discrimination in a minimal group setting, and to investigate the impact of group entitativity on this bias. Four group entitativity conditions were created by altering the mere categorization condition toward less entitativity and toward more entitativity. Participants were asked to describe the choice allegedly made by another participant in allocating resources to ingroup and outgroup members. Results showed an overall linguistic bias, whereby ingroup behaviors were described more positively and abstractly than outgroup behaviors. Increasing group entitativity resulted in increasingly biased outgroup descriptions, which in the most entitative condition revealed a predominant use of negative abstract terms.

Not all Stereotypic Biases are Created Equal: Evidence for a Stereotype-Disconfirming Bias

Stereotype-confirming biases are well documented in the social psychological literature. However, motivations to disconfirm social stereotypes may be more influential for unprejudiced individuals. Three experiments are presented that test the hypothesis that extremely unprejudiced people exhibit a bias toward stereotype disconfirmation. Experiment 1 investigates stereotype disconfirmation in information-seeking preferences. Experiments 2 and 3 explore attributional strategies for stereotype disconfirmation. In all experiments, unprejudiced participants respond in ways reflecting a motivation to disconfirm social stereotypes. Implications for stereotype change and stereotypic influences on judgment and behavior are discussed.

Language Use and Attributional Biases in Close Personal Relationships

Attributional biases in close relationships can take the form of either an actor-observer bias (i. e., attributions to partner dispositions) or an egocentric bias (self-attributions). Hence, different theoretical approaches lead to contradictory predictions. To resolve this conflict, the language used to describe one's own and one's partner's behavior was analyzed. Free descriptions were coded with respect to sentence subjects (self vs. partner) and the abstractness of Predicates. Evidence was found for both types of biases, though at different levels of language use. An actor-observer bias was obtained at the abstract level of adjectives, whereas an egocentric bias was found at the level of interpretive action verbs (i.e., manifest behaviors). Language use is also shown to be related to satisfaction with the partnership, action verbs being a better predictor than adjectives. The role of lan guage in mediating or elucidating social cognitive phenomena is discussed.