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One of the tricks our mind plays is to highlight evidence which confirms what we already believe: a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. A research study by Princeton University suggests a possible solution. If people are asked to "consider the opposite"--analyse a study's methodology and imagine the results pointed the opposite way--they strengthen their reasoning, and consequently, are less likely to elevate the ratings of studies which they agree with or become extreme in their views.

This article highlights the phrases that Clinton used during the presidential debate to attract black voters. Phrases like "systematic racism", "implicit bias", "black bias", and "racist" were used to identify with the black voters. Many viewers were excited that she was facing such issues and was tackling them head on because according to this article, "A big chunk of Americans - not just people of color - want our leadership to talk about race, and to talk about policing the criminal justice system and the role that race plays in those institutions." As a presidential candidate, Clinton has been forced to become more skilled with the word choice. Here, she attempts to appeal herself to different groups of people to attract votes.

A recent study suggests that our use of positive language has been on the decline for the past 200 years. The study measured the language positivity bias by analyzing the ratio of positive words to negative words. Language mirrors our psychological state, so this finding may suggest that happiness is also declining among the population.

Although recent election coverage may suggest otherwise, research shows that people are more likely to use positive words than negative words on the whole in their communications. Behavioral scientists have extensively documented this phenomenon, known as language positivity bias, in a number of different languages.

Studies suggest a link between negative cognition (a.k.a. negative thinking) and increased propensity for guilt, chronic anxiety clinical depression. (Apparently, women are more prone to negative cognition than men.) Psychology professor Emeritus Tom Stevens of California State University describes some common negative thinking pitfalls and offers advice as to what you can do instead. Research has supported the efficacy of cognitive therapy (called cognitive restructuring) that replaces these styles with more positive thinking. 1. Negative bias. Negative bias is a tendency to look at the more negative side of some event, person, object, or situation. It gives a negative interpretation or a negative point of view for looking at a situation. Instead think: I will assume the best instead of assume the worst. Positive self-fulfilling prophesies tend to create positive outcomes; negative self-fulfilling prophesies tend to create negative outcomes. Negative explanations of my own or other peoples' underlying motives cause me to intensify my anger or other negative feelings. Assuming the world is a hostile place creates fear, anxiety, and anger. 2. Negative selective abstraction. Selective abstraction means taking negative features of a situation out of context and exaggerating their significance. Usually it also means negating positive features. Example: A student who gets four "A"s and one "C," then focuses on the "C's." Instead think: I will list at least one positive feature for each negative feature. I will limit my focus on negative features to constructive thoughts about how I can either accept or change the negative features. 3. Overgeneralization. When we overgeneralize, we assume far-reaching conclusions from limited data. A student made a "D" on one test. She overgeneralizes, she doesn't just think "Well, I messed up on that one test. Instead, "I may not pass the course, not ever finish college." "I must be stupid and a failure." "My whole life is ruin

Forcing language isn't possible, it just happens on its own. Many people have looked down and wanted to get rid of these speech features but surprisingly using filler words says a few things about a person. Saying "um" doesn't just fill in pauses but also signals a new topic/idea wanting to be mentioned in the conversation. Whenever someone says filler words, they are working hard in a conversation. The article also goes into how women adopted vocal fry, which is where a person goes into their lowest register and usually sound very raspy and creaky. Many people complain about it but it's all cultural bias. The bias that people have on women's voice affects how people view speech feature that they have contributed to the English language.

I found this article on writing survey questions really helpful. Definitely worth a read if you're planning to use survey instrumentation as part of your research data collection process. Badly-written questions can skew data, cause confusion, and bias respondents. The number of questions, how choices are ordered, and the demographics of who you're surveying can also affect the information that you gather.

I've noticed this trend, too, in a lot of the articles I've posted recently. Something to be aware of: "...we worry that shorter, single-study articles can be poor models of science. ... we are troubled by the link between small study size and publication bias. Theoretically, if several small studies on a topic, each with its own small data set, are sent to publishers, the overall published results should be equivalent to the results of a single large study on that topic using a complete data set. But according to several "meta-studies" that have been conducted, this is often not the case: rather than the small studies' converging on the same result as a large study when published, the small studies give a very different result. ... Small studies are inherently unreliable - larger studies or, better still, multiple studies on the same topic, are more likely to give definitive, accurate results."

Is technology killing other languages? Some seem to think that the internet is bias against foreign languages (not English) because the "lingua franca" of the computer world is English. With so many people learning English through technology is it worth the extinction of other languages?

"What happens when speakers try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? In 4 studies, we show that listeners can fail to detect dodges when speakers answer similar-but objectively incorrect-questions (the "artful dodge"), a detection failure that goes hand-in-hand with a failure to rate dodgers more negatively. We propose that dodges go undetected because listeners' attention is not usually directed toward a goal of dodge detection (i.e., Is this person answering the question?) but rather toward a goal of social evaluation (i.e., Do I like this person?). "

Just having a feminine voice means you're probably not as capable at your job. At least, studies suggest, that's what many people in the United States think. There's a gender bias in how Americans perceive feminine voices: as insecure, less competent and less trustworthy.

A really interesting study combining linguistics and behavioral economics. "To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language: A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived."

This article analyzes how accent discrimination has become a problem. People often discriminate when an accent or someone's name is foreign. We also embrace that our words should sound a certain way and even though everyone has an accent, we struggle to have an open mind with those who have a different accent than us.

Skepticism of online "news" serves as a decent filter much of the time, but our innate biases allow it to be bypassed, researchers have found - especially when presented with the right kind of algorithmically selected "meme." At a time when political misinformation is in ready supply, and in demand, "Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College (and occasional contributor to The Times's Upshot column). Why? Here are the key reasons: 1. Individual bias/first impressions: subtle individual biases are at least as important as rankings and choice when it comes to spreading bogus news or Russian hoaxes. Merely understanding what a news report or commentary is saying requires a temporary suspension of disbelief. Mentally, the reader must temporarily accept the stated "facts" as possibly true. A cognitive connection is made automatically: Clinton-sex offender, Trump-Nazi, Muslim men-welfare. And refuting those false claims requires a person to first mentally articulate them, reinforcing a subconscious connection that lingers far longer than people presume.Over time, for many people, it is that false initial connection that stays the strongest, not the retractions or corrections. 2. Repetition: Merely seeing a news headline multiple times in a news feed, even if the news is false, makes it seem more credible. 3. People tend to value the information and judgments offered by good friends over all other sources. It's a psychological tendency with significant consequences now that nearly two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media.

This article talks about how the history of social psychology has contributed scientific evidence to help us understand human interactions. Social psychology has been influenced by theorists and researchers throughout history, including Gordon Allport, Kurt Lewin, and Norman Triplett. Research ranges in all types of social settings such as the workplace, educational institutions, society, in the family, etc. It has been found that the way people interact with each other depends on attractiveness, familiarity, associations, perseverance bias, and self-fulfilling prophecies. People belong to various groups whether they choose to or not, and these groups are based on affiliations with others. Group cohesion, connectedness, and belonging are all important things that influence our wellbeing and how we choose to treat others.

A new study shows how certain ideas are still deeply ingrained the public's minds as masculine. For example, most of the public associates the president with a man. In fact, the study showed that when articles or people used "her" or feminine pronouns people's reading times increased because of the confusion caused in their brain. Many people don't use "she" when referring to a hypothetical president. The way that language can sometimes gender certain occupations has some important implications. That is why many states and representatives are trying to change the language to make it more inclusive. For example, Kamala Harris, when she was California's attorney general, and changed all the wording of the statutes that referred to the attorney general as a man. This is because gendering occupations can lead to an ingrained bias. However, with more women in politics, biases could change. For example, in UK, where there have been 2 female prime ministers, the study was replicated and it was found that people were comfortable using "she" or "her" when stating the next prospective prime minister.

You only use 10 percent of your brain. Eating carrots improves your eyesight. Vitamin C cures the common cold. Crime in the United States is at an all-time high. None of those things are true. But the facts don't actually matter: People repeat them so often that you believe them. Welcome to the "illusory truth effect," a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth. Marketers and politicians are masters of manipulating this particular cognitive bias. "Repetition makes things seem more plausible," says Lynn Hasher, a psychologist at the University of Toronto whose research team first noticed the effect in the 1970s. "And the effect is likely more powerful when people are tired or distracted by other information."

Analyzing the verbs that followed male and female pronouns in 100K stories, the following patterns were observed: 1. Women are more likely to be in the role of victims- "she screams", "she cries", or "she pleads." Men tend to be the aggressor: "he kidnaps" or "he beats". Not all male-oriented terms are negative- many, like "he saves"/"he rescues" are distinctly positive- but almost all are active rather than receptive. 2. There's an old stereotype (that's appeared in works like Game of Thrones and Sherlock Holmes) that "poison is a woman's weapon", and this is supported in our analysis. Female characters are more likely to "poison", "stab", or "kick"; male characters are more likely to "beat", "strangle", or simply "murder" or "kill". Men are moderately more likely to "steal", but much more likely to "rob". 3. Based on this text analysis, a fictional murderer is about 2.5X as likely to be male than female, but in America (and likely elsewhere) murderers are about 9X more likely to be male than female. This means female murderers may be overrepresented in fiction relative to reality. David Robinson, the data scientist who ran the text analysis, offers these questions for future research: 1.Is the shift stronger in some formats or genre than another? We could split the works into films, novels, and TV series, and ask whether these gender roles are equally strong in each. 2. Is the shift different between male- and female- created works? 3. Has the difference changed over time? Some examination indicates the vast majority of these plots come from stories written in the last century, and most of them from the last few decades (not surprising since many are movies or television episodes, and since Wikipedia users are more likely to describe contemporary work). 4. I'd also note that we could expand the analysis to include not only pronouns but first names (e.g. not only "she tells", but "M

How are gendered languages holding up in society's current push for gender-neutral terms? This NPR podcast explores gender bias in the Spanish language, the role of the Real Academia Española, and efforts led by teenagers in Argentina to de-gender the Spanish language.

This article explains the evolution of language and the influence AI has on modern language. Author Rob Toews gives his insight into the dangers of AI (bias and toxicity) and possible trends in AI linguistics.