Social psychology: Evaluations of social groups with statistical semantics

Semantic analyses are potentially important, but underutilized, tools to study social psychology. This chapter focuses on how semantic analysis, using personal pronouns, can be used to study important phenomena in social psychology. Personal pronouns can be used as proxies for social categories, and the semantic contexts associated to these pronouns can be used to study stereotypes and how groups are evaluated (Gustafsson Sendén, M., Personal pronouns in evaluative communication. Stockholm University, Stockholm, 2014; Pennebaker, J. W., The secret life of pronouns: What our words say about us. Bloomsbury Press, New York, NY, 2011). In this chapter, we exemplify this within three well-known social psychology phenomena; gender stereotypes, self-bias, and group-serving bias. The semantic analyses target both content and evaluations of these social categories.