Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Are You What You Read? Predicting Implicit Attitudes to Immigration Based on Linguistic Distributional Cues From Newspaper Readership
T2 - A Pre-registered Study
AU - Lynott, Dermot
AU - Walsh, Michael
AU - McEnery, Tony
AU - Connell, Louise
AU - Cross, Liam
AU - O'Brien, Kerry S.
PY - 2019/5/3
Y1 - 2019/5/3
N2 - The implicit association test (IAT) measures bias towards often controversial topics (e.g., race, religion), while newspapers typically take strong positive/negative stances on such issues. In a pre-registered study, we developed and administered an immigration IAT to readers of the Daily Mail (a typically anti-immigration publication) and the Guardian (a typically pro-immigration publication) newspapers. IAT materials were constructed based on co-occurrence frequencies from each newspapers' website for immigration-related terms (migrant/immigrant) and positive/negative attributes (skilled/unskilled). Target stimuli showed stronger negative associations with immigration concepts in the Daily Mail compared to the Guardian, and stronger positive associations in the Guardian corpus compared to the Daily Mail corpus. Consistent with these linguistic distributional differences, Daily Mail readers exhibited a larger IAT bias, revealing stronger negative associations to immigration concepts compared to Guardian readers. This difference in overall bias was not fully explained by other variables, and raises the possibility that exposure to biased language contributes to biased implicit attitudes.
AB - The implicit association test (IAT) measures bias towards often controversial topics (e.g., race, religion), while newspapers typically take strong positive/negative stances on such issues. In a pre-registered study, we developed and administered an immigration IAT to readers of the Daily Mail (a typically anti-immigration publication) and the Guardian (a typically pro-immigration publication) newspapers. IAT materials were constructed based on co-occurrence frequencies from each newspapers' website for immigration-related terms (migrant/immigrant) and positive/negative attributes (skilled/unskilled). Target stimuli showed stronger negative associations with immigration concepts in the Daily Mail compared to the Guardian, and stronger positive associations in the Guardian corpus compared to the Daily Mail corpus. Consistent with these linguistic distributional differences, Daily Mail readers exhibited a larger IAT bias, revealing stronger negative associations to immigration concepts compared to Guardian readers. This difference in overall bias was not fully explained by other variables, and raises the possibility that exposure to biased language contributes to biased implicit attitudes.
KW - IAT
KW - language
KW - implicit attitudes
KW - bias
KW - implicit association test
KW - ASYLUM SEEKERS
KW - REPRESENTATION
KW - BIAS
KW - ACQUISITION
KW - STEREOTYPE
KW - PREJUDICE
KW - REFUGEES
U2 - 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00842
DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00842
M3 - Journal article
VL - 10
JO - Frontiers in Psychology
JF - Frontiers in Psychology
SN - 1664-1078
M1 - 842
ER -