Evidence map›Paper›PMID 35787033›Full record

ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022

Historical representations of social groups across 200 years of word embeddings from Google Books.

Tessa E S Charlesworth, Aylin Caliskan, Mahzarin R Banaji

Abstract readHistorical Article
In one paragraph

Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
22citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

22 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
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  5. Explicitly unbiased large language models still form biased associations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025
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  6. Article
  7. Article
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  11. Article
  12. Historical trends in teacher personality from human language.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024
    Article
  13. GPT is an effective tool for multilingual psychological text analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024
    Article
  14. Americans harbor much less favorable explicit sentiments toward young adults than toward older adults.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024
    Article
  15. Article
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  20. Review
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Tessa E S CharlesworthDepartment of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Aylin CaliskanInformation School, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195.
Mahzarin R BanajiDepartment of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.ORCID 0000-0002-5941-7455

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Using word embeddings from 850 billion words in English-language Google Books, we provide an extensive analysis of historical change and stability in social group representations (stereotypes) across a long timeframe (from 1800 to 1999), for a large number of social group targets (Black, White, Asian, Irish, Hispanic, Native American, Man, Woman, Old, Young, Fat, Thin, Rich, Poor), and their emergent, bottom-up associations with 14,000 words and a subset of 600 traits. The results provide a nuanced picture of change and persistence in stereotypes across 200 y. Change was observed in the top-associated words and traits: Whether analyzing the top 10 or 50 associates, at least 50% of top associates changed across successive decades. Despite this changing content of top-associated words, the average valence (positivity/negativity) of these top stereotypes was generally persistent. Ultimately, through advances in the availability of historical word embeddings, this study offers a comprehensive characterization of both change and persistence in social group representations as revealed through books of the English-speaking world from 1800 to 1999.

Indexed as

BooksSearch EngineFemaleHistory, 19th CenturyHistory, 20th CenturyHumansLanguageMalePopulation GroupsStereotypingattitude changenatural language processingstereotype changeword embeddings

Identifiers

PMID35787033
PMCPMC9282454

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY-NC-ND
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.