Intersectional race-gender stereotypes in natural language.

How are Asian and Black men and women stereotyped? Research from the gendered race and stereotype content perspectives has produced mixed empirical findings. Using BERT models pre-trained on English language books, news articles, Wikipedia, Reddit and Twitter, with a new method for measuring propositions in natural language (the Fill-Mask Association Test, FMAT), we explored the gender (masculinity-femininity), physical strength, warmth and competence contents of stereotypes about Asian and Black men and women. We find that Asian men (but not women) are stereotyped as less masculine and less moral/trustworthy than Black men. Compared to Black men and Black women, respectively, both Asian men and Asian women are stereotyped as less muscular/athletic and less assertive/dominant, but more sociable/friendly and more capable/intelligent. These findings suggest that Asian and Black stereotypes in natural language have multifaceted contents and gender nuances, requiring a balanced view integrating the gender schema theory and the stereotype content model. Exploring their semantic representations as propositions in large language models, this research reveals how intersectional race-gender stereotypes are naturally expressed in real life.

Discerning cultural shifts in China? Commentary on Hamamura et al. (2021).

By examining the changes in the conceptual associations between individualism-collectivism and 10 other concepts based on the Google Ngram Chinese Corpus from the 1950s to the 1990s, Hamamura et al. (2021) inferred (a) no rise in individualism; (b) continuing collectivism; and (c) no effect of modernization on individualism in contemporary China. We question the validity of these conclusions given the following issues in their research: (a) misinterpretation of statistical results; (b) improper calculation of cultural associations; and (c) inappropriate generalization of specific findings. Contrary to their original findings, our reanalysis of their data suggests that individualism has been increasingly accepted and associated with some positive (vs. negative) aspects of life (e.g., income vs. loss, richness vs. poverty) over recent decades in China. Future research should use more rigorous methods and diverse corpora to clarify and explain changes in individualism and collectivism in China. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Novel Evidence for the Increasing Prevalence of Unique Names in China: A Reply to Ogihara.

In this study, we aimed to address three comments proposed by Ogihara on a recent study where we found that unique names in China have become increasingly popular from 1950 to 2009. Using a large representative sample of Chinese names (N = 2.1 million), we replicated the increase in uniqueness of Chinese names from 1920 to 2005, especially since the 1970s, with multiple uniqueness indices based on name-character frequency and name-length deviation. Over the years, Chinese characters that are rare in daily life or naming practice were more often used in given names, and the length of given names became more deviant from typical practice (i.e., more one-character and three-character given names and higher standard deviation of name length). Taken together, these findings not only reconfirmed the increasing prevalence of unique names but also demonstrated the validity of various indices in assessing name uniqueness in China.