Automatically Distinguishing People’s Explicit and Implicit Attitude Bias by Bridging Psychological Measurements with Sentiment Analysis on Large Corpora

Abstract

Social psychological studies show that people’s explicit attitude bias in public expression can differ from their implicit attitude bias in mind. However, the current automatic attitude analysis does not distinguish between explicit and implicit attitude bias. Simulating the psychological measurements of explicit and implicit attitude bias, i.e., self-report assessment (SRA) and implicit association test (IAT), we propose an automatic language-based analysis to distinguish explicit and implicit attitude bias in a large population. By connecting the criteria of SRA and IAT with the statements containing patterns of special words, we derive explicit and implicit attitude bias with the sentiment scores of the statements, which are obtained by pre-trained machine-learning methods. Extensive experiments on four English and Chinese corpora and four pairs of concepts show that the attitude biases obtained by our method on a large population are consistent with those of traditional psychological experiments in the costly small-scale experiments. The maximum gap between the sentiment scores of explicit and implicit biases reaches 0.9329. Furthermore, we achieve new findings on the difference between the evolution of explicit and implicit attitude bias. The maximum variance gap of sentiment scores in the dynamic changes between explicit and implicit biases reaches 0.249.

Keywords

• attitude bias
• self-report assessment
• implicit association test
• sentiment analysis