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Are there any overlaps or thoughts regarding Sapir Whorf here in your research?


Yes! We address this in the section "Implications for understanding human prejudice".

The simplicity and strength of our results suggests a new null hypothesis for explaining origins of prejudicial behavior in humans, namely, the implicit transmission of ingroup/outgroup identity information through language. That is, before providing an explicit or institutional explanation for why individuals make decisions that disadvantage one group with regards to another, one must show that the unjust decision was not a simple outcome of unthinking reproduction of statistical regularities absorbed with language. Similarly, before positing complex models for how prejudicial attitudes perpetuate from one generation to the next or from one group to another, we must check whether simply learning language is sufficient to explain the observed transmission of prejudice. These new null hypotheses are important not because we necessarily expect them to be true in most cases, but because Occam’s razor now requires that we eliminate them, or at least quantify findings about prejudice in comparison to what is explainable from language transmission alone

(The paper has more along these lines.)




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