Based on billions of words on the internet, people = men.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 35363515.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.abm2463 and PMC identifier 10938580.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Recent advances have made it possible to precisely measure the extent to which any two words are used in similar contexts. In turn, this measure of similarity in linguistic context also captures the extent to which the concepts being denoted are similar. When extracted from massive corpora of text written by millions of individuals, this measure of linguistic similarity can provide insight into the collective concepts of a linguistic community, concepts that both reflect and reinforce widespread ways of thinking. Using this approach, we investigated the collective concept person/people, which forms the basis for nearly all societal decision- and policy-making. In three studies and three preregistered replications with similarity metrics extracted from a corpus of over 630 billion English words, we found that the collective concept person/people is not gender-neutral but rather prioritizes men over women-a fundamental bias in our species' collective view of itself.