9.1 Language and Thought

Topic:

How Do Subtle Language Changes Influence Decisions?

Statistical Concepts Covered:

In this applet, you’ll expand on your knowledge of main effects and interactions (see the activity on Learning), and relationships to evaluate potential biases in interpreting graphs and issues with experimental designs.

Introduction:

The linguistic relativity hypothesis covered in your text presents the idea that “language shapes the nature of thought.” This hypothesis was applied to how we process color and the concept of time, but what about other topics? How might language impact our perception of blame and how much someone should be punished?

The data in this applet comes from research conducted by Fausey and Boroditsky (2009) exploring the impact of language on guilty verdicts, blame ratings, and liability estimates. More specifically, the researchers were primarily interested in testing agentive and nonagentive languaging. Agentive language refers to when a subject is responsible for an action, such as “he ripped”, “she killed”, and “he burned it”. This is in contrast to nonagentive language, which refers to when there is no subject responsible for the action, such as “it ripped”, “it died”, and “it burned”.

How might the wording of criminal trials or accident reports impact a person’s perception of whether the individual involved was guilty or not, how much blame they are responsible for, and the amount the person should be held liable? Let’s explore these questions further using the data from this study.

Richard Alan Hullinger, Indiana University, Bloomington
Melanie Maggard, University of the Rockies

Question

Before conducting their studies, Fausey and Boroditsky (2009) analyzed archival data of around 200,000 criminal trials in London. They evaluated whether particular key phrases were related to a guilty verdict. They were primarily interested in whether the use of agentive language, such as “killed it”, “broke it”, and “burned it”, resulted in more guilty verdicts than nonagentive language, such as “it died”, “it broke”, and “it burned”. In looking at the relationship between these two variables, let’s assume we are using agency as the independent or predictor variable, and percent of guilty verdicts as the dependent or outcome variable. What pattern can we observe in these three scenarios for agentive versus nonagentive language? (Cycle through the three “% Guilty” graphs.)

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