10,547 research outputs found
Linguistic Intergroup Bias:Stereotype perpetuation through language
No full textPrejudice and stereotyping have always been a prominent topic in social psychology, but until recently very little attention has been paid to the role of language in the transmission and maintenance of stereotypes. According to the author, if we want to understand how stereotypes function and how they become shared knowledge in a given society, we need to understand not only the cognitive and motivational processes by which they are driven but also the way in which they are transmitted. Over the past decade, the author has investigated one aspect of language, namely language abstraction, that may play a subtle but potentially important role in stereotype transmission and maintenance. It is the goal of this chapter to describe this research program as it developed over the past years, to discuss its implications, and to propose extensions of the model to related areas
LE CAUSE DISTALI E PROSSIMALI DELLO SPATIAL AGENCY BIAS
No full textI nostri vissuti passano attraverso la fisicità dei nostri corpi che si muovono lungo coordinate spaziali. Lo spazio è qui proposto non solo come contesto necessario dell’esperienza fisica ma anche come elemento chiave della cognizione in generale e della cognizione sociale in particolare. Il presente lavoro indaga l’aspetto spaziale delle rappresentazioni di target sociali (Spatial Agency Bias), differenziando il ruolo delle cause distali (Studio 1) da quelle prossimali (Studio 2) sul bias stesso. A livello distale la direzione della scrittura è proposta come fattore chiave nella promozione di un vettore privilegiato, veicolato appunto dalle frequenti e persistenti azioni legate sia alla lettura che alla scrittura. Il ruolo della direzione della scrittura è mostrato nello Studio 1 in un confronto delle rappresentazioni visive di concetti astratti da parte di partecipanti Arabi (scrittura destra-sinistra) e Italiani (scrittura sinistra-destra). Lo studio 2 propone un additivo effetto di cause prossimali che possono momentaneamente attivare una direzione incongruente a quella normalmente promossa dalla scrittura e quindi ridurne l’effetto. Un compito di scrittura verso destra o verso sinistra funge da causa prossimale in grado di interferire con il bias spaziale classico rafforzandolo o indebolendolo. I risultati sono in linea con un approccio culturale allo Spatial Agency Bias (Maass & Russo, 2003) e con un’interpretazione teorica di embodied cognition (Barsalou, 2008)
Cultures two routes to embodiment. A commentary
No full textComments on an article by Dov Cohen and Angela K.Y Leung (see record 2009-23823-030). The central argument of Cohen and Leung's article on The hard embodiment of culture is that cultures also differ systematically with respect to the body comportments or postures they impose or encourage and that this will, in turn, affect the way people feel and think. Although this prediction may sound familiar to people acquainted with cross-cultural work on nonverbal behavior, this is, in my view, an important, currently under-researched, aspect of embodiment. The main argument of the authors is that such culture-specific forms of embodiment will affect complex representations and that they will do so through two distinct routes: pre-wired versus totem embodiments. I will briefly comment each of these points, by establishing links with previous areas of research, identifying open problems, and delineating possible future developments. Throughout this brief comment I have purposefully focused on the unidirectional effect of embodiment on cognitive representations rather than vice versa. According to most embodiment approaches, the link between body and mind should be conceived as bidirectional such that bodily actions not only activate complex representations, but also vice versa, feeding into a self-reinforcing cycle. More than any other area of psychological research it would therefore be desirable to develop feedback models that do justice to the bidirectional link between body and mind
Spatial Agency Bias: Representing People in Space
No full textIn this chapter, we argue that the way we read and write exerts a pervasive, subtle, and generally unacknowledged influence on social cognition. We propose a theoretical model, the Spatial Agency Bias (SAB), according to which human agency is envisaged following the script direction that is prevalent in a given cultural context (for instance, left to right in English and right to left in Arabic or Hebrew). This bias is the joint function of two interrelated asymmetries, one deriving from script direction, the other from subject-object order. We report findings supporting the basic premises of the model and then discuss its pervasive role in intergroup relations and its practical applications in the areas of Website construction, advertisement, and, most importantly, stereotype change. We also address boundary conditions and moderators, with particular attention to construal level. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the SAB within the larger embodied cognition approach. © 2016 Elsevier Inc
Writing Direction, Agency and Gender Stereotyping: An Embodied Connection
No full textWriting direction has surprising effects on social cognition. These effects are addressed with a specific focus on languages written from left-to-right vs. right-to-left. The trajectory, in which a language is written, produces subtle spatial-cognitive biases, affecting the way in which social targets are imagined, represented, recognized, and classified. Specifically, according to the Spatial Agency Bias (SAB) model, social targets are envisaged in space so that agentic targets (e.g., males) are represented in line with the trajectory of written language (e.g., showing the rightward profile in languages written rightwards). From an embodied-cognition perspective, this effect is interpreted as the result of a simulation of the writing/reading activity while mentally representing an agentic target. SAB pervades different stages of information processing, including on-line and off-line cognition, encoding and decoding processes, and is part of a self-perpetuating cycle in which stereotypic beliefs affect spatial bias which in turn shapes subsequent beliefs
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