Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The implicit association test (IAT) measures bias towards often controversial topics (race/religion), while newspaperstypically take strong positive/negative stances on such issues. In a pre-registered study, we developed and administered an im-migration IAT to readers of the Daily Mail (typically anti-immigration) and Guardian (typically pro-immigration) newspapers.IAT Materials were constructed based on co-occurrence frequencies from each newspapers’ website for immigration-relatedterms (migrant) and positive/negative attributes (skilled/unskilled). Target stimuli showed stronger negative associations withimmigration concepts in the Daily Mail corpus compared to the Guardian corpus, and stronger positive associations in theGuardian corpus compared to the Daily Mail. Consistent with these linguistic distributional differences, Daily Mail readersexhibited a larger IAT bias, revealing stronger negative associations to immigration concepts compared to Guardian readers.This difference in overall bias was not explained by other variables, and raises the possibility that exposure to biased languagecontributes to biased implicit attitudes.