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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Probably one more of those studies whose conclusions are inflated way beyond their actual effects, and at the end they fail reproduction spectacularly, but not before there are 9000 books written about them and "everybody knows" they are true. I mean, it's possible it is not, but most likely it is.

My Linguistics 101 take on it (I hate categorically dismissing a paper):

It's an okay study in itself; they give subjects a stick figure drawing, and say

“Please use the text boxes below to describe in 3 sentences what the person in the image is doing. Please be as specific as possible and provide as much detail as you can. In your description of this individual, it is important that you use the pronouns ‘[he/she/they]’ and ‘[his/her/their].’ This will help to standardize the accounts provided by all participants in this survey, which will make them easier to interpret.”

with each individual receiving a version with one of masculine/female/neutral pronouns (except in Swedish, with they/their being a new pronoun recently introduced by the government).

They then poll subjects on several political topics, and those primed with different pronouns show meaningfully different results. My main complaint here is around social desirability bias, as the prompt makes it pretty obvious the object of study here. They attempt to rule it out by measuring reaction times, but I don't find that particularly compelling. It's also weird that the results they find go beyond salience (e.g. increased recall of female politicians) to a wide range of issues ("profemale preferences"), as there's no suggested short-term mechanism that would do this. I don't think that compelled use of pronouns would make people immediately switch their votes from Trump to Clinton or move from opposition to support of gay marriage and abortion, and they only discuss salience because that's the only part they have a plausible mechanism for. The exceptionally broad result suggests they're not measuring what they think they're measuring, and social desirability fits better than increased adherence to progressive principles.

The broader issue is what you point out: who knows if the study will replicate. If a hundred grad students attempt to, we'll get five papers saying it does replicate, none saying it doesn't, and a thousand articles in the popular media saying it does. Other things (like the known issues with Sapir-Whorf-style linguistic determinism that should make us skeptical of the result) will never be mentioned as important context for the results.

Well we have also the story of the priming work which was hyped to the high heavens and then turned out to be exaggerated, largely non-replicable and looking like Wikipedia's "list of research fallacies". That does not inspire too much confidence in similar approaches.