ASIA: Automated Social Identity Assessment using linguistic style

Miriam Koschate,Avelie Stuart,Alessandra Russo,Elahe Naserian,Mark Levine,Luke Dickens

doi:10.3758/s13428-020-01511-3

Abstract

The various group and category memberships that we hold are at the heart of who we are. They have been shown to affect our thoughts, emotions, behavior, and social relations in a variety of social contexts, and have more recently been linked to our mental and physical well-being. Questions remain, however, over the dynamics between different group memberships and the ways in which we cognitively and emotionally acquire these. In particular, current assessment methods are missing that can be applied to naturally occurring data, such as online interactions, to better understand the dynamics and impact of group memberships in naturalistic settings. To provide researchers with a method for assessing specific group memberships of interest, we have developed ASIA (Automated Social Identity Assessment), an analytical protocol that uses linguistic style indicators in text to infer which group membership is salient in a given moment, accompanied by an in-depth open-source Jupyter Notebook tutorial (https://github.com/Identity-lab/Tutorial-on-salient-social-Identity-detection-model). Here, we first discuss the challenges in the study of salient group memberships, and how ASIA can address some of these. We then demonstrate how our analytical protocol can be used to create a method for assessing which of two specific group memberships—parents and feminists—is salient using online forum data, and how the quality (validity) of the measurement and its interpretation can be tested using two further corpora as well as an experimental study. We conclude by discussing future developments in the field.

Highlights

The various group and category memberships that we hold are at the heart of who we are
This finding supports the idea that a salient identity can be detected through a particular linguistic style pattern that is prototypical for the social group, and that individuals change their linguistic style in line with the salience of their identity
As we have recently demonstrated, by combining Automated Social Identity Assessment (ASIA) with other computational methods such as social network analysis, social influence in online groups can be studied from a social identity perspective (Cork, Everson, Levine, & Koschate, 2020; Turner, 1991)

Summary

Introduction

The various group and category memberships that we hold are at the heart of who we are. The salient social category affects our attitudes (Reynolds, Turner, Haslam, & Ryan, 2001), cognitions (Haslam, Oakes, Reynolds, & Turner, 1999), emotions (Doosje, Branscombe, Spears, & Manstead, 1998), and behavior. The various group and category memberships that we hold are understood to form an important part of our self—our social identity. This conceptualization of the self recognizes that groups and their norms affect our cognitions, emotions, and behavior in many social situations in a way that cannot be explained through the personal, idiosyncratic aspects of our self, our personal identity. Social identity can help us to understand collective behavior (e.g., protests), collective emotions (e.g., national pride), and shared attitudes (e.g., prejudice)

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