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e-mail address is managed by the coordinators of the CEU Social Mind Center.
Central European University
Quellenstrasse 51 | 1100 Vienna, Austria
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Language Comprehension Lab invites you to the following talk:
Hugh Rabagliati (The University of Edinburgh)
Biased language and the double-edged sword of efficient communication
Natural language contains and communicates a variety of social biases, a fact that increasingly impacts human activity. Biases in language are typically assumed to reflect biases and prejudices in how we think about social groups, but here I’ll discuss evidence for an additional psychological cause, in which linguistic biases arise as a consequence of the automatised mechanisms that we use to communicate efficiently. Psycholinguistic and developmental experiences document that, when describing events, speakers show a “like me” bias to highlight the perspectives of their own social groups, a fact that holds across demographic categories, linguistic backgrounds, and age. Psycholinguistic manipulations pinpoint that the bias is not caused by attitudes or social goals, but instead by greater efficiency in retrieving words that refer to in-group members. These data provide a new cognitive explanation for why people produce biased language, and highlight how detailed cognitive theories can also have fundamental social implications.
Date: Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Time: 4 pm to 5:30 pm CET
Venue: QS D-001 Tiered* (Vienna)
Topic: Colloquium: Hugh Rabagliati
Chair: Eva Wittenberg
*Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP to get access to the lecture hall.
Please note that we might make a video recording of the lecture, store the record for an unlimited period of time under CEU’s Panopto account, and share the link with CEU students, staff and faculty.
Best regards,
Andi and Fanni