Natural language contains and communicates social biases, often reflecting attitudes, prejudices and stereotypes. Here we provide evidence for a novel psychological pathway for the expression of such biases, in which they arise as a consequence of the automatized mechanisms by which humans retrieve words to produce sentences. Four experiments show that, when describing events, speakers tend to mention people who are more like them first and, thus, tend to highlight the perspectives of their own social groups. This ‘like me’ effect was seen in speakers from multiple demographic groups, in both English and Chinese speakers and in both first- and second-language English speakers. Psycholinguistic manipulations pinpoint that the bias is caused by greater accessibility in memory of words that refer to in-group than out-group members. These data provide a new cognitive explanation for why people produce biased language and highlight how detailed cognitive theories can have social implications.

自然语言包含并传达社会偏见，通常反映态度、偏见和刻板印象。在这里，我们为这种偏见的表达提供了一种新的心理途径的证据，其中它们是人类检索单词以产生句子的自动化机制的结果。四个实验表明，在描述事件时，说话者往往会首先提到与他们更相似的人，因此，往往会突出他们自己社会群体的观点。这种 “像我一样 ”的效果在多个人口群体的说话者中都可以看到，在英语和中文使用者中，在英语第一语言和第二语言使用者中都可以看到。心理语言学操作指出，这种偏见是由于对指向内群体成员的单词的记忆比对外群体成员的记忆更容易获得而引起的。这些数据为人们为什么会产生有偏见的语言提供了新的认知解释，并强调了详细的认知理论如何产生社会影响。