Social psychologists have shown that Warmth (W) and Competence (C) are the primary dimensions along which we assess other people and groups. These dimensions impact various aspects of our lives from social competence and emotion regulation to success in the work place and how we view the world. More recent work has started to explore how these dimensions develop, why they have developed, and what they constitute. Of particular note, is the finding that warmth has two distinct components: Trust (T) and Sociability (S). In this work, we introduce Words of Warmth, the first large-scale repository of manually derived word--warmth (as well as word--trust and word--sociability) associations for over 26k English words. We show that the associations are highly reliable. We use the lexicons to study the rate at which children acquire WCTS words with age. Finally, we show that the lexicon enables a wide variety of bias and stereotype research through case studies on various target entities. Words of Warmth is freely available at: http://saifmohammad.com/warmth.html

Stereotypical language expresses widely-held beliefs about different social categories. Many stereotypes are overtly negative, while others may appear positive on the surface, but still lead to negative consequences. In this work, we present a computational approach to interpreting stereotypes in text through the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), a comprehensive causal theory from social psychology. The SCM proposes that stereotypes can be understood along two primary dimensions: warmth and competence. We present a method for defining warmth and competence axes in semantic embedding space, and show that the four quadrants defined by this subspace accurately represent the warmth and competence concepts, according to annotated lexicons. We then apply our computational SCM model to textual stereotype data and show that it compares favourably with survey-based studies in the psychological literature. Furthermore, we explore various strategies to counter stereotypical beliefs with anti-stereotypes. It is known that countering stereotypes with anti-stereotypical examples is one of the most effective ways to reduce biased thinking, yet the problem of generating anti-stereotypes has not been previously studied. Thus, a better understanding of how to generate realistic and effective anti-stereotypes can contribute to addressing pressing societal concerns of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.

E-readers have become one of the most pervasive pieces of tech for many reasons. They survive alongside tablets because they're accessible -- Amazon's entry-level Kindle is just $80 -- and don't require daily charging. E-ink displays don't strain your eyes nearly as much as backlit screens, nor do they keep you up at night. Above all else, though, they can hold the entire works of Shakespeare countless times over while being thinner and lighter than any paperback. But this idea of portability, of condensing the written word into a format only a device can understand, is older than The Great Gatsby.

Someone sent me this article by psychology professor Susan Fiske, scheduled to appear in the APS Observer, a magazine of the Association for Psychological Science. The article made me a little bit sad, and I was inclined to just keep my response short and sweet, but then it seemed worth the trouble to give some context. I'll first share the article with you, then give my take on what I see as the larger issues. The title and headings of this post allude to the fact that the replication crisis has redrawn the topography of science, especially in social psychology, and I can see that to people such as Fiske who'd adapted to the earlier lay of the land, these changes can feel catastrophic. I will not be giving any sort of point-by-point refutation of Fiske's piece, because it's pretty much all about internal goings-on within the field of psychology (careers, tenure, smear tactics, people trying to protect their labs, public-speaking sponsors, career-stage vulnerability), and I don't know anything about this, as I'm an outsider to psychology and I've seen very little of this sort of thing in statistics or political science. As I don't know enough about the academic politics of psychology to comment on most of what Fiske writes about, so what I'll mostly be talking about is how her attitudes, distasteful as I find them both in substance and in expression, can be understood in light of the recent history of psychology and its replication crisis. In short, Fiske doesn't like when people use social media to publish negative comments on published research. She's implicitly following what I've sometimes called the research incumbency rule: that, once an article is published in some approved venue, it should be taken as truth.