Lynott, Dermot and Walsh, Michael and McEnery, Tony and Connell, Louise and Cross, Liam and O’Brien, Kerry (2019) Are You What You Read? Predicting Implicit Attitudes to Immigration Based on Linguistic Distributional Cues From Newspaper Readership; A Pre-registered Study. Frontiers in Psychology, 10 (842). ISSN 1664-1078

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright © 2019 Lynott, Walsh, McEnery, Connell, Cross and O’Brien. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Cite as: Lynott D, Walsh M, McEnery T, Connell L, Cross L and O’Brien K (2019) Are You What You Read? Predicting Implicit Attitudes to Immigration Based on Linguistic Distributional Cues From Newspaper Readership; A Pre-registered Study. Front. Psychol. 10:842. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00842
Keywords:	IAT; language; implicit attitudes; bias; implicit association test;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Psychology
Item ID:	15409
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00842
Depositing User:	Dermot Lynott
Date Deposited:	02 Feb 2022 16:09
Journal or Publication Title:	Frontiers in Psychology
Publisher:	Frontiers Media
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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