How do we communicate stereotypes? Linguistic bases and inferential consequences

The linguistic expectancy bias is defined as the tendency to describe expectancy-consistent information at a higher level of abstraction than expectancy-inconsistent information. The communicative consequences of this bias were examined in 3 experiments. Analyses of judgments that recipients made on the basis of linguistically biased information generated by transmitters indicated that behavior in expectancy-consistent messages was attributed more to dispositional and less to situational factors than behavior in expectancy-inconsistent messages. Moreover, this effect was mediated by the level of linguistic abstraction of the messages. These findings provide direct evidence for the hypothesis that recipients are sensitive to variations in linguistic abstraction in spontaneous language use because of stereotypes. Results are discussed with respect to the interpersonal aspects of stereotyping.     

A Preliminary Investigation into Effects of Linguistic Abstraction on the Perception of Gender in Spoken Language

We investigated the role that linguistic abstraction may play in people’s perceptions of gender in spoken language. In the first experiment, participants told stories about their best friend and romantic partner. Variations in linguistic abstraction and gender-linked adjectives for describing their close others were examined. Participants used significantly more abstract language to describe men compared to women, possibly reflecting a gender stereotype associated with the dispositionality factor of linguistic abstraction. In a second experiment, a new group of participants judged the gender of the protagonists from the stories generated in Experiment 1, after the explicit linguistic gender cues were removed. Consistent with the dispositionality factor, linguistic abstraction moderated the effects of the gender stereotypicality of the context (masculine, feminine, or neutral) on participants’ gender judgments. Discussion focuses on the implications of the results for the communication of gender stereotypes and the effects of linguistic abstraction in more naturalistic language.     

Essentialist beliefs about personality and their implications

Two studies examine implicit theories about the nature of personality characteristics, asking whether they are understood as underlying essences. Consistent with the hypothesis, essentialist beliefs about personality formed a coherent and replicable set. Personality characteristics differed systematically in the extent to which they were judged to be discrete, biologically based, immutable, informative, consistent across situations, and deeply inherent within the person. In Study 1, the extent to which characteristics were essentialized was positively associated with their perceived desirability, prevalence, and emotionality. In Study 2, essentialized characteristics were judged to be particularly important for defining people's identity, for forming impressions of people, and for communicating about a third person. The findings indicate that people understand some personality attributes in an essentialist fashion, that these attributes are taken to be valued elements of a shared human nature, and that they are particularly central to social identity and judgment.     

Remembering information related to one's self

How does memory for an incident vary depending on whether, and how, the person relates the information to himself? Trait adjectives are better remembered if they were judged in reference to oneself rather than judged for meaning or sound. Our first experiment found a similar mnemonic advantage of referring a described episode or object to some event from one's life. Pleasant events were remembered better than unpleasant ones. A second experiment found incidental memory for trait adjectives was equally enhanced by judging each directly in reference to one's self-concept or indirectly by retrieving an episode either from one's life or from one's mother's life. Contrariwise, memory was poorer when traits were judged in reference to a less familiar person. Thus, good memory depends on relating the inputs to a well-differentiated memory structure.     

Cultural perspectives on the linguistic representation of emotion and emotion events

It is argued that the linguistic representation of emotions and events giving rise to them is influenced by the cultural regulation of the relationship between a person and others. Such cultural variations are expected to be reflected in how emotions and emotion events are represented in language. The two studies provide support for the hypothesis that in a culture where relationships and interdependence are valued emotion terms function as relationship-markers and emotion events are represented by the use of concrete linguistic terms when compared with cultures that emphasise the value of the individual. Moreover, we also found support for the argument that emotion terms function predominantly as self-markers in cultures that value individuality and that they are represented by more abstract terms (adjectives, nouns). The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Making sense of life stories: the role of narrative perspective in perceiving hidden information about social identity

Does the narrative perspective people adopt when describing important life events convey any hidden information to audiences about their social identities? In this experiment, participants (who were either professional psychotherapists, or laypersons) formed impressions about, and judged the identities of narrators who described important identity‐related life events (being Jewish, being gay, being infertile) from one of three different narrative perspectives (retrospective, experiencing and re‐experiencing). Results showed that narrative perspective had a highly significant influence on impression formation and identity judgments even when the same events were described. Narrators using the retrospective perspective were generally judged to be better adjusted, more socially desirable and less anxious and dynamic than were narrators describing the same events from the experiencing or re‐experiencing perspectives. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An on-line look at automatic contrast and correction of behavior categorizations and dispositional inferences

The current study examined on-line behavior recategorization as a mechanism underlying corrections for contextual influences in dispositional inferences. After watching an initial comparison video that portrayed either a successful or unsuccessful performance on a spatial ability task, cognitive load and no load participants watched and made real-time ratings of a target performance. The comparison video was expected to exert a contrastive influence on participants' automatic impressions of the performance (behavior categorizations) and the child's intelligence (dispositional inferences). Load participants' on-line and post-video performance and ability ratings showed this expected effect, as did no load participants' initial on-line performance ratings. However, no load participants' later on-line and post-video ratings did not. These findings support the notion that corrections for contextual influence can occur at the level of behavior identification as perceivers encode behavioral cues.     

A failure to replicate rapid syntactic adaptation in comprehension

Language comprehension requires successfully navigating linguistic variability. One hypothesis for how listeners manage variability is that they rapidly update their expectations of likely linguistic events in new contexts. This process, called adaptation, allows listeners to better predict the upcoming linguistic input. In previous work, Fine, Jaeger, Farmer, and Qian (PLoS ONE, 8, e77661, 2013) found evidence for syntactic adaptation. Subjects repeatedly encountered sentences in which a verb was temporarily ambiguous between main verb (MV) and reduced relative clause (RC) interpretations. They found that subjects who had higher levels of exposure to the unexpected RC interpretation of the sentences had an easier time reading the RC sentences but a more difficult time reading the MV sentences. They concluded that syntactic adaptation occurs rapidly in unexpected structures and also results in difficulty with processing the previously expected alternative structures. This article presents two experiments. Experiment 1 was designed as a follow-up to Fine et al.’s study and failed to find evidence of adaptation. A power analysis of Fine et al.’s raw data revealed that a similar study would need double the items and four times the subjects to reach 95% power. In Experiment 2 we designed a close replication of Fine et al.’s experiment using these sample size guidelines. No evidence of rapid syntactic adaptation was found in this experiment. The failure to find evidence of adaptation in both experiments calls into question the robustness of the effect.     

The justice and injustice of life events

An experiment employing a sample (N=280) of undergraduates from an urban university was designed to test the general hypothesis that the perception of justice and injustice in life events depends upon the relationship between two variables that are part of the stimulus situation: the valence of the person being observed (good or bad), and the valence of the outcome experienced by that person (positive or negative). The findings from both qualitative (analysis of spontaneous comments) and quantitative scale ratings supported the prediction that justice and injustice perceptions depend respectively on whether the signs of the person–outcome valences are the same or different. Two perceptual biases were revealed by the analysis. The first was a positive outcome bias: respondents rated as more just outcomes that were positive regardless of the goodness or badness of the person in the life event. The second was a justice bias: respondents in both measures found the just life events to be more just than unjust life events to be unjust. Finally the more religious respondents perceived the life events as more just regardless of the patterns of person–outcome valences than did the less religious, suggesting a third, religiosity bias. A number of theoretical implications and questions for future research were discussed, including the quantification of the hypothesis and its cross-cultural generality.     

The double meaning of a single act: influences of the perceiver and the perceived on cooperative behaviour

The present research examines how a single behaviour that is informative of both the morality and intelligence of a person influences impressions, degree of cooperative behaviour expected from that person, and degree of cooperative behaviour displayed toward that person in a mixed‐motive interdependence situation (i.e., a social dilemma). Furthermore, it is investigated how individual differences in social value orientation influence these processes. Participants were provided with behavioural information that could be construed in terms of both morality (high/low) and intelligence (high/low). Consistent with the morality‐importance hypothesis, participants assigned greater weight to morality than to intelligence aspects of the information. Congruent with the social value orientation hypothesis (i) only proselfs and not prosocials expected more cooperation from unintelligent than from intelligent others, and (ii) prosocials attended more strongly to morality aspects than proselfs in deciding on own cooperation. Finally, consistent with the relative benefit hypothesis, people overall expected more cooperation than they were willing to display, and this tendency was especially pronounced with others described by moral/unintelligent behaviour, and for people with a proself value orientation. The authors discuss a model describing influences of the perceiver and the perceived on cooperative behaviour. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dispositional and comparative optimism interact to predict avoidance of a looming health threat

Research indicates that when confronted with a health threat, individuals high in both dispositional and comparative optimism employ a more avoidant style of coping than individuals high in dispositional but low in comparative optimism. We examined the hypothesis that threat distance moderates this interactive optimism association. In two studies, participants were randomly assigned to a looming or distant threat condition. Study 1 revealed that in the looming threat condition, participants high in both forms of optimism were more likely to minimise the threat and less inclined to seek additional health information relative to participants high in dispositional but low in comparative optimism. In Study 2, the same interaction pattern emerged on a measure of psychological abstraction suggesting these variables combine to alter broad information processing strategies. Implications for considering multiple forms of optimism when delivering health status information are discussed.     

Acquisition of dispositional attributions: effects of sample size and covariation

Two experiments examined whether dispositional attributions are sensitive to the sample size of the evidence indicating a given level of covariation between person and behavior. Participants were given high or low levels of covariation (i.e. consensus and distinctiveness), and the acquisition of dispositional attributions was monitored by requesting dispositional trait ratings at fixed intervals. The results showed that dispositional attributions were sensitive to sample size, and increased given more evidence on high person‐behavior covariation while they decreased given more evidence on low person‐behavior covariation. Additional analyses suggested that in making dispositional inferences (e.g. about the actor), there was a slight preference for agreement information (e.g. low distinctiveness) over difference information (e.g. low consensus). The effects of sample size are inconsistent with current statistical or probabilistic models of covariation, but are in line with connectionist networks using an error‐correcting learning algorithm. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Taking the edge off of disagreement: linguistic abstractness and self‐presentation to a heterogeneous audience

The use of linguistic abstraction in self‐presentation was examined. Participants, whose goal it was to be liked by recipients, presented their political views to an audience of two people. Participants learned beforehand that the two recipients had the same political views as the participant, that both had different political views from the participant, or that one had similar views to and one had dissimilar views from the participant. Theorising that variations in the degree of linguistic abstractness used by participants when describing their political views were related to their social goals, it was hypothesised that participants would describe their political views at a higher level of linguistic abstractness when communicating with a similar agreeing audience than when communicating with a mixed audience. Results confirmed this hypothesis. The role of linguistic abstractness in achieving self‐presentational goals is discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.