She’s the next president. Wait, did you read that right?
Source: The New York Times
It was a blip of a moment during the Democratic debate last week, one perhaps overshadowed by a long discussion of the prospect of a female president. Responding to a question about climate change, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said, “I will do everything a president can do all by herself on the first day.”
All by herself. Did you clock the use of that word?
A study released this month shows that you did — and that, in fact, it may have cost you a third of a second in reading time just now.
Her. It’s a three-letter pronoun that, despite the seemingly endless debate over whether a woman can become president, feels relatively benign. But what if its use, or an unconscious aversion to its use, had some small power to influence voter perception? Could something as simple as a pronoun reflect, or even affect, the way voters understand power?
That’s the question raised by the research, conducted by cognitive scientists and linguists at M.I.T., the University of Potsdam and the University of California, San Diego, who surveyed people during the run-up to the 2016 election. Wanting to understand how world events might influence language, the researchers hypothesized that the possibility a woman would be elected president at that time might override the implicit bias people had toward referring to the president as “he.”
Click here to read the full article published by The New York Times on 24 January 2020.
It was a blip of a moment during the Democratic debate last week, one perhaps overshadowed by a long discussion of the prospect of a female president. Responding to a question about climate change, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said, “I will do everything a president can do all by herself on the first day.”
All by herself. Did you clock the use of that word?
A study released this month shows that you did — and that, in fact, it may have cost you a third of a second in reading time just now.
Her. It’s a three-letter pronoun that, despite the seemingly endless debate over whether a woman can become president, feels relatively benign. But what if its use, or an unconscious aversion to its use, had some small power to influence voter perception? Could something as simple as a pronoun reflect, or even affect, the way voters understand power?
That’s the question raised by the research, conducted by cognitive scientists and linguists at M.I.T., the University of Potsdam and the University of California, San Diego, who surveyed people during the run-up to the 2016 election. Wanting to understand how world events might influence language, the researchers hypothesized that the possibility a woman would be elected president at that time might override the implicit bias people had toward referring to the president as “he.”
Click here to read the full article published by The New York Times on 24 January 2020.