Echoes of Culture: Relationships of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes With Contemporary English, Historical English, and 53 Non-English Languages

Abstract

Attitudes are intertwined with culture and language. But to what extent? Emerging perspectives in attitude research suggest that cultural representations in language are more related to implicitly measured (vs. explicitly measured) attitudes, and that such relationships persist across history and diverse languages. We offer a comprehensive test of these ideas by correlating (a) attitudes toward 55 topics (e.g., Rich/Poor, Dogs/Cats, Love/Money) from ~100,000 U.S. English-speaking participants with (b) representations of those same topics in word embeddings from contemporary English text, 200 years of English books, and 53 non-English languages. Strong and robust relationships emerged between representations in contemporary English and implicitly but not explicitly measured attitudes. Moreover, strong correlations with implicitly measured attitudes persisted across 200 years of books, and most non-English languages. Results provide new insights into the nature of implicitly measured attitudes and how they are intertwined with cultural representations that are relatively hidden in patterns of language across time and place.