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6 - From Social Psychology to Cognitive Sociolinguistics

The Self-Serving Bias and Interplay with Gender and Modesty in Language Use

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2024

By
Willem B. Hollmann
Edited by
Eva Duran Eppler ,
Nikolas Gisborne  and
Andrew Rosta
Eva Duran Eppler
Affiliation:
Roehampton University, London
Nikolas Gisborne
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Andrew Rosta
Affiliation:
University of Central Lancashire, Preston
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Summary

The main aim of this paper is to show that the notion of the ’self-serving bias’, well established in social psychological research, may have an impact on the way in which speakers verbalise certain experiences. I hypothesise that this perceptual bias will interact with other factors; specifically, gender stereotypes (as defined by psychologists and linguists) and modesty (as defined in linguistic pragmatics). I present corpus evidence for the relevance of the self-serving bias and the complex interplay with gender stereotypes and modesty, based on variation between three different causative constructions (CAUSE, X MAKE Y happen, and X BRING about Y) as well as the use of the adverbs cleverly and stupidly. In both cases, my analysis focuses on the cooccurrence with personal pronoun subjects — specifically, differences in terms of person (first vs third) and gender (masculine vs feminine). The most general conclusion I draw is that cognitive (socio-)linguists may be able to formulate interesting new research questions based on concepts drawn from (social) psychology but that constructs developed within linguistics remain highly relevant as well.

Keywords

cognitive sociolinguisticsself-serving biasgender stereotypesmodestypolitenesscausative constructionssemantic prosodycollocationssocial psychologysocial cognition
Type
Chapter
Information
Word Grammar, Cognition and Dependency , pp. 144 - 162
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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