Stereotypical Associations Research Articles

Explicit Gender Stereotyping in Bilingualism: The Impact of the Foreign Language Effect

This study investigates how the language used to present lexical stimuli influences the expression of gender biases, with a particular focus on the “Foreign Language Effect” (FLE) – the phenomenon where using a foreign language affects judgment and reasoning. Italian native speakers (N=213), English native speakers (N=105), and Italian-English bilinguals (N=192) evaluated 58 words categorized into Power, Weakness, Warmth and Coldness domains for gender connotation. Results indicated consistent stereotypical associations across languages, albeit with variable strength. Critically, participants exhibited attenuated stereotyping when assessing words in a non-native language, providing further empirical validation for the FLE. Foreign language use appears to elicit less automatic social biases, potentially due to decreased emotional activation and increased cognitive distance that occur when processing information in a less proficient language. Additionally, this reduction in stereotyping may be attributed to less exposure to and internalization of sexist language in a second language. By demonstrating the role of language in modulating bias expression, these insights have implications for understanding sociocultural perception formation and developing equitable language policies.

Using word embeddings for immigrant and refugee stereotype quantification in a diachronic and multilingual setting

Word embeddings are efficient machine-learning-based representations of human language used in many Natural Language Processing tasks nowadays. Due to their ability to learn underlying word association patterns present in large volumes of data, it is possible to observe various sociolinguistic phenomena in the embedding semantic space, such as social stereotypes. The use of stereotypical framing in discourse can be detrimental and induce misconceptions about certain groups, such as immigrants and refugees, especially when used by media and politicians in public discourse. In this paper, we use word embeddings to investigate immigrant and refugee stereotypes in a multilingual and diachronic setting. We analyze the Danish, Dutch, English, and Spanish portions of four different multilingual corpora of political discourse, covering the 1997–2018 period. Then, we measure the effect of sociopolitical variables such as the number of offences committed and the size of the refugee and immigrant groups in the host country over our measurements of stereotypical association using the Bayesian multilevel framework. Our results indicate the presence of stereotypical associations towards both immigrants and refugees for all 4 languages, and that the immigrants are overall more strongly associated with the stereotypical frames than refugees.

Stereotypes bias social class perception from faces: The roles of race, gender, affect, and attractiveness.

People quickly form consequential impressions of others' social class standing from nonverbal cues, including facial appearance. Extant research shows that perceivers judge faces that appear more positive, attractive, and healthy as higher-class, in line with stereotypes associating high class standing with happiness, attractiveness, and better wellbeing (which bear a kernel of truth). A wealth of research, moreover, demonstrates strong stereotypical associations between social class and both race and gender. The current work bridged these areas of inquiry to explore (1) intersectional biases in social class impressions from faces and (2) how associations between social class and attractiveness/health and affect can be used to shift social class impressions. Our studies found evidence of race and gender stereotypes impacting British perceivers' social class judgements, with Black (vs. White and Asian) and female (vs. male) faces judged as lower in class. Furthermore, manipulating faces' emotion expression shifted judgements of their social class, with variations in magnitude by faces' race, such that emotion expressions shifted judgements of Black faces more than White faces. Finally, manipulating faces' complexion to appear healthier/more attractive shifted social class judgements, with the magnitude of this varying by faces' and perceivers' race, suggesting a role of perceptual expertise. These findings demonstrate that stereotypes bias social class impressions and can be used to manipulate them.

When men are wonderful: A larger happy face facilitation effect for male (vs. female) faces for male participants.

Facial cues for age, race, and sex influence how we recognize facial expressions. For example, the faster recognition of happy compared to sad expression increases in magnitude when the faces are female compared to male-an effect termed Researchers have argued that presenting expressions of opposite valence (e.g., sad vs. happy expressions) creates an evaluative mindset and consequently, face sex affects emotion recognition via evaluative rather than stereotype associations. For the comparison between anger and happiness, recent results indicate that the effects of face sex are larger for female participants. However, for the critical comparison between sad and happy expressions-used to support the evaluative over the stereotype account-moderation by participant sex has not been adequately examined because the sample size of male participants has been too small. Here, I increased the number of male participants relative to previous studies. For male participants, the usual facilitation effect for female faces was reversed-the happy face facilitation effect was larger for male compared to female faces. The novel pattern for male participants-supporting an in-group bias-was replicated in Study 2, a preregistered study. Finally, ex-Gaussian analyses of the results of Study 1 and Study 2 helped identify differences between the current research and previous studies that had reported participant sex differences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Exit, Voice, and Gender

Albert Hirschman’s exit-voice paradigm provides a useful lens for analyzing the current neo-categorical phase of gender politics in which attention has shifted from the content of the binary gender categories to the structure of the gender category system. During this phase of categorical destabilization, exit from originally assigned categories—in bureaucratically recorded, statistically reported, and informally negotiated forms—has become culturally legitimate and institutionally supported in a broadening range of milieus. Hirschman’s paradigm brings into focus the selectivity of exit and its potentially—and paradoxically—stabilizing consequences for the traditional gender order. The increased ease and pronounced selectivity of exit can channel dissatisfaction with gender arrangements into exit rather than voice or—as exit may itself be a form of voice—into individualized, psychologically driven forms of voice. And the selective exit of gender-nonconforming individuals from originally assigned categories can reinforce the stereotypical associations of these categories with gender conformity.

Improving Gender-Related Fairness in Sentence Encoders: A Semantics-Based Approach

The ever-increasing number of systems based on semantic text analysis is making natural language understanding a fundamental task: embedding-based language models are used for a variety of applications, such as resume parsing or improving web search results. At the same time, despite their popularity and widespread use, concern is rapidly growing due to their display of social bias and lack of transparency. In particular, they exhibit a large amount of gender bias, favouring the consolidation of social stereotypes. Recently, sentence embeddings have been introduced as a novel and powerful technique to represent entire sentences as vectors. We propose a new metric to estimate gender bias in sentence embeddings, named bias score. Our solution leverages semantic importance of words and previous research on bias in word embeddings, and it is able to discern between neutral and biased gender information at sentence level. Experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate that our novel metric can identify gender stereotyped sentences. Furthermore, we employ bias score to detect and then remove or compensate for the more stereotyped entries in text corpora used to train sentence encoders, improving their degree of fairness. Finally, we prove that models retrained on fairer corpora are less prone to make stereotypical associations compared to their original counterpart, while preserving accuracy in natural language understanding tasks. Additionally, we compare our experiments with traditional methods for reducing bias in embedding-based language models.

Cognitive Processes Underlying the Weapon Identification Task: A Comparison of Models Accounting for Both Response Frequencies and Response Times

The weapon identification task (WIT) is a sequential priming paradigm designed to assess effects of racial priming on visual discrimination between weapons (guns) and innocuous objects (tools). We compare four process models that differ in their assumptions on the nature and interplay of cognitive processes underlying prime-related weapon-bias effects in the WIT. All four models are variants of the process dissociation procedure, a widely used measurement model to disentangle effects of controlled and automatic processes. We formalized these models as response time-extended multinomial processing tree models and applied them to eight data sets. Overall, the default interventionist model (DIM) and the preemptive conflict-resolution model (PCRM) provided good model fit. Both assume fast automatic and slow controlled process routes. Additional comparisons favored the former model. In line with the DIM, we thus conclude that automatically evoked stereotype associations interfere with correct object identification from the outset of each WIT trial.

Art, Music, & Mashups: A View from the Bench on Creativity and Copyright

Creativity has captured human fascination for centuries. It has been said that “[t]here is little that shapes the human experience as profoundly and pervasively as creativity.” But what is creativity? Is it pure originality? Divine inspiration? Clever assimilation of existing ideas? Despite creativity’s central role in human progress, the term eludes finite definition.
 To Plato, creative inspiration was divine. In contrast, Kant thought that creative geniuses were not divinely inspired but born with a particular quickness of mind that fostered brilliance and innovation. T.S. Eliot recognized the critical role of borrowing in creative work, quipping, “[i]mmature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take; and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
 In psychology, a leading theory of creativity requires inspiration from existing concepts. In his “associative theory” of creativity, Sarnoff Mednick posits that most of us have predictable, stereotypical associations with a given stimulus, while the creative among us are able to retrieve remote associations. For instance, although most associate “table” with “chair,” the creative might proffer “leg” or “food.” Defining creativity as a framework of novel associations between existing concepts, Mednick distinguishes originality from creativity, finding the former of little import.
 However different theorists and disciplines might define creativity, its outcomes are varied, enduring, and ever evolving. Creativity has brought us everything from Rodin’s sculptures and Van Gogh’s paintings to Newton’s scientific discoveries, from musical scores and movies to computer code.
 Where, then, does the law intersect with creativity? The United States Constitution directs Congress to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Born from that critical clause is the American approach to copyright. Recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as “the engine of free expression,” copyright law enriches “the general public through access to creative works.”
 To illustrate how copyright law fulfills its aims through the lens of art, music, and “mashups,” I invite you to accompany me on a short tour of copyright law’s dance with creativity by offering select examples from federal appellate decisions and a view from the bench.

Adaptation of the Educational Program "Drawing and Painting" under the Martial Law Conditions

The purpose of the article is to substantiate and reveal the innovations of the pedagogical approach to teaching the course "Drawing and painting", which became a quick reaction to changes in social reality due to the invasion of the russian federation in Ukraine. To continue the educational process, the educational program was updated and adapted to the extreme conditions of wartime by the author of the article. The article examines the reasons for the updated teaching methodology and the results of innovations. The research methodology. The empirical method and the method of pedagogical experiment, as well as analysis and synthesis, are used in the process of working on the article. The results of the updated method of teaching drawing and painting based on the analysis of social reality and the generalization of psychological advice regarding the behavior and mental health of the civilian population are outlined. The scientific novelty of the study is to record the experience of implementing the program of the course "Drawing and Painting", adapted to the conditions of the martial law. The specific connections of psychological and practical problems, which are faced by teachers and students on a large scale today, are considered. The effectiveness of the new structuring of the educational program in the conditions of the fundamental transformation of classes to the online format has been established. Conclusions. Continuation of the educational process during periods of social cataclysms, even such as war, is the duty of both scientific and pedagogical workers and students of higher education. However, the stressful situation forces us to look for new forms of interaction between the teacher and the student. Accordingly, the educational program "Drawing and painting" was adjusted – full-scale academic productions were replaced by a set of more independent creative tasks that do not require constant contact of the student with the teacher in the classroom.The aim of the updated online course is to master various means of visual presentation of student’s ideas, to study all stages of work, from the concept of the work to the selection of the composition’s format and the creation of an original and expressive graphic image. The updated course is focused on developing the ability to move beyond stereotypical associations and work with a wide range of images. The conducted pedagogical experiment allows us to assert that the individualized process of performing creative tasks within sufficiently broad thematic boundaries contributes to the development of creative analytical thinking, activates the creative abilities of students and forms an intellectual approach to learning, motivation and professional values.

Navigating the leaky pipeline: Do stereotypes about parents predict career outcomes in academia?

The motherhood penalty seemingly reflects a preference to hire female professionals who are not parents compared to mothers, however, little is known about whether this effect is attributable to parent stereotypes per se. Study 1 assessed the content of the parent-academia stereotypes of 180 individuals working in Education and revealed stronger stereotypical associations of fathers with academia than mothers. Study 2 investigated what parent-academia stereotypes predict in terms of endorsements for hiring men versus women in a mock hiring task set in an academic context. Academics (N = 112) evaluated mock job candidates for an Assistant Professor post while the gender, parental status and leave status of the candidates were manipulated. The findings showed that parents were significantly less likely to be endorsed to be hired than non-parents, regardless of gender. Parent-academia stereotypes led to biased hiring recommendations, such that a greater endorsement of parent-academia stereotypes predicted a reduced likelihood to endorse hiring parents compared to non-parents. Implications for reducing parent stereotypes in academic contexts are discussed.

Racialized Perceptions of Vegetarianism: Stereotypical Associations That Undermine Inclusion in Eating Behaviors.

Shifting societal eating patterns toward a vegetarian diet offers promise for improving public health and environmental sustainability. Yet concerns exist about racial disparities in inclusion, as some sentiments suggest that vegetarianism is stereotypically associated with Whiteness. Through four studies (total N = 3,234), we investigated associations U.S. adults hold between race and vegetarianism, along with implications for behavior change and belongingness among Black individuals. Participants, across racial backgrounds, strongly associated vegetarianism with Whiteness, both explicitly and implicitly. A race prime led Black participants to report lower interest in becoming a vegetarian, whereas a prime of race-vegetarianism associations decreased Black participants' feelings of belongingness in the vegetarian community. Exposure to racially inclusive messaging about vegetarianism, meanwhile, increased belongingness among Black participants. These findings provide the first quantitative insights into racial stereotypes about vegetarianism and pose future directions for theory, research, and practice at the intersections of race and eating behavior.

Debiasing System 1: Training favours logical over stereotypical intuiting

AbstractWhereas people’s reasoning is often biased by intuitive stereotypical associations, recent debiasing studies suggest that performance can be boosted by short training interventions that stress the underlying problem logic. The nature of this training effect remains unclear. Does training help participants correct erroneous stereotypical intuitions through deliberation? Or does it help them develop correct intuitions? We addressed this issue in four studies with base-rate neglect and conjunction fallacy problems. We used a two-response paradigm in which participants first gave an initial intuitive response, under time pressure and cognitive load, and then gave a final response after deliberation. Studies 1A and 2A showed that training boosted performance and did so as early as the intuitive stage. After training, most participants solved the problems correctly from the outset and no longer needed to correct an initial incorrect answer through deliberation. Studies 1B and 2B indicated that this sound intuiting persisted over at least two months. The findings confirm that a short training can debias reasoning at an intuitive “System 1” stage and get reasoners to favour logical over stereotypical intuitions.

Economic scarcity increases racial stereotyping in beliefs and face representation

Racial discrimination typically expands under resource scarcity, but the psychological mechanisms driving this effect remain poorly understood. We examined the role of stereotypes in this effect, given their theorized function in asserting and maintaining existing group hierarchies, and hypothesized that stereotype expression would be heightened in response to scarcity, a signal of social instability. In Study 1, the manipulated perception of scarcity strengthened reported knowledge of stereotypes of Black Americans as low in socioeconomic status and as threatening, relative to control participants. In Study 2, perceived scarcity increased the stereotypicality of participants' visualizations of a Black male face, as assessed using a reverse correlation procedure and judged by independent raters. Study 3 replicated the effect of scarcity on stereotypic face visualizations and further demonstrated that scarcity increased anti-Black stereotypes even among individuals with relatively weak implicit stereotype associations. Together, these studies reveal that the mere perception of scarcity can increase stereotyping of Black Americans, as expressed in self-reports and implicit visualizations of Black faces. We discuss the potential role of stereotyping under scarcity as a means to justify racial discrimination and maintain power structures in response to systemic threat.

Gender Stereotypes in Hollywood Movies and Their Evolution over Time: Insights from Network Analysis

The present analysis of more than 180,000 sentences from movie plots across the period from 1940 to 2019 emphasizes how gender stereotypes are expressed through the cultural products of society. By applying a network analysis to the word co-occurrence networks of movie plots and using a novel method of identifying story tropes, we demonstrate that gender stereotypes exist in Hollywood movies. An analysis of specific paths in the network and the words reflecting various domains show the dynamic changes in some of these stereotypical associations. Our results suggest that gender stereotypes are complex and dynamic in nature. Specifically, whereas male characters appear to be associated with a diversity of themes in movies, female characters seem predominantly associated with the theme of romance. Although associations of female characters to physical beauty and marriage are declining over time, associations of female characters to sexual relationships and weddings are increasing. Our results demonstrate how the application of cognitive network science methods can enable a more nuanced investigation of gender stereotypes in textual data.

Defining Conjunto Quantitatively: Classical and Modernist Styles in a Texas-Mexican Genre

Defining <i>Conjunto</i> Quantitatively: Classical and Modernist Styles in a Texas-Mexican Genre

Psychedelic use predicts objective knowledge about climate change via increases in nature relatedness

Lifetime psychedelic substance use has previously been linked to nature relatedness and pro-environmental behaviour. Yet, participants’ responses to the self-report measures in these studies may have been affected by stereotypical associations or confirmation bias. We therefore re-examined this link by measuring three pro-environmental dependent variables: nature relatedness, concerns about climate change, and objective knowledge about climate change. Additionally assessing lifetime experience with 30 psychoactive substances, we collected an international convenience sample for an online survey ( n = 641), Controlling for age, educational attainment, and covariation in substance use indicators, psychedelic use (primarily the use of psilocybin) predicted objective knowledge about climate change directly, and indirectly via nature relatedness. Further, it predicted concern about climate change indirectly via nature relatedness. The results suggest that the relationship of psychedelics with pro-environmental variables is not due to psychological biases, but manifests in variables as diverse as emotional affinity towards nature as well as knowledge about climate change.

Facial Stereotyping Drives Judgments of Perceptually Ambiguous Social Groups

When seeing a face, people form judgments of perceptually ambiguous social categories (PASCs), for example, gun-owners, gay people, or alcoholics. Previous research has assumed that PASC judgments arise from the statistical learning of facial features in social encounters. We propose, instead, that perceivers associate facial features with traits (e.g., extroverted) and then infer PASC membership via learned stereotype associations with those traits. Across three studies, we show that when any PASC is more stereotypically associated with a trait (e.g., alcoholics = extroverted), perceivers are more likely to infer PASC membership from faces conveying that trait (Study 1). Furthermore, we demonstrate that individual differences in trait–PASC stereotypes predict face-based judgments of PASC membership (Study 2) and have a causal role in these judgments (Study 3). Together, our findings imply that people can form any number of PASC judgments from facial appearance alone by drawing on their learned social–conceptual associations.

Language attitudes and the subjective perception of language in San Andrés and Providencia (Colombia)

This paper investigates language attitudes among Raizales from San Andrés and Providencia islands, Colombia. The paper analyzes stereotypical associations to Creole, Spanish, and English and addresses the question of whether or not the perception of linguistic stimuli is a function of the input-language. The study combined a matched-guise (MG) technique and a qualitative approach using a free association task to disclose emic categories to perceive and judge the languages. The results show that the perception of language is very stereotypical and dependent on whether or not the speaker is perceived as a member of the Raizal ethnic group. The MG results showed that speech is perceived differently as a function of the input-language. Spanish stimuli received the lowest scores as compared to Creole and English, suggesting a negative attitude toward Spanish in San Andrés. The paper provides empirical evidence of the perception of language as a response of ethnicity.

Facial Impressions Are Predicted by the Structure of Group Stereotypes

Impressions of other people’s faces (e.g., trustworthiness) have long been thought to be evoked by morphological variation (e.g., upturned mouth) in a universal, fixed manner. However, recent research suggests that these impressions vary considerably across perceivers and targets’ social-group memberships. Across 4,247 U.S. adults recruited online, we investigated whether racial and gender stereotypes may be a critical factor underlying this variability in facial impressions. In Study 1, we found that not only did facial impressions vary by targets’ gender and race, but also the structure of these impressions was associated with the structure of stereotype knowledge. Study 2 extended these findings by demonstrating that individual differences in perceivers’ own unique stereotype associations predicted the structure of their own facial impressions. Together, the findings suggest that the structure of people’s impressions of others’ faces is driven not only by the morphological variation of the face but also by learned stereotypes about social groups.

Implicit gender-career bias in postgraduate medical training still exists, mainly in residents and in females

BackgroundMore and more female residents enter postgraduate medical training (PGMT). Meanwhile, women are still underrepresented in academic medicine, in leadership positions and in most surgical specialties. This suggests that female residents’ career development may still be negatively impacted by subtle, often unconscious stereotype associations regarding gender and career-ambition, called implicit gender-career bias. This study explored the existence and strength of implicit gender-career bias in doctors who currently work in PGMT, i.e. in attending physicians who act as clinical trainers and in their residents.MethodsWe tested implicit gender-career bias in doctors working in PGMT by means of an online questionnaire and an online Implicit Association Test (IAT). We used standard IAT analysis to calculate participants’ IAT D scores, which indicate the direction and strength of bias. Linear regression analyses were used to test whether the strength of bias was related to gender, position (resident or clinical trainer) or specialty (non-surgical or surgical specialty).ResultsThe mean IAT D score among 403 participants significantly differed from zero (D-score = 0.36 (SD = 0.39), indicating bias associating male with career and female with family. Stronger gender-career bias was found in women (βfemale =0 .11; CI 0.02; 0.19; p = 0.01) and in residents (βresident 0.12; CI 0.01; 0.23; p = 0.03).ConclusionsThis study may provide a solid basis for explicitly addressing implicit gender-career bias in PGMT. The general understanding in the medical field is that gender bias is strongest among male doctors’ in male-dominated surgical specialties. Contrary to this view, this study demonstrated that the strongest bias is held by females themselves and by residents, independently of their specialty. Apparently, the influx of female doctors in the medical field has not yet reduced implicit gender-career bias in the next generation of doctors, i.e. in today’s residents, and in females.