Condition effects

Media exposure affected ratings of competence in hypothesized directions. Interestingly, there were not significant differences in the change between baseline and evaluation, indicating that while condition did influence evaluation ratings, they did not influence them enough to trigger significant change within participants.

While these results support the claim that media influences language attitudes, they do not necessarily reflect the strong effects that might be expected from such a widely held assumption, particularly in the change score regression. The visualization of the change scores (see Figure 5.6) may provide a hint to the reason there were not strong condition effects in the change score regression. While participants in the counterstereotypical condition showed more change in all three of the status adjectives, those in the stereotypical condition showed greater change in the two solidarity adjectives. In other words, if someone heard intelligent Southerners, their ratings of status shifted more; if they heard unintelligent Southerners, their ratings of solidarity shifted more. This pattern may indicate that stereotypically portrayed ASE accents

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trigger solidarity associations more so than status associations. The IAT results indicated an association with lack of intelligence, but that does not mean there is not also an association with solidarity adjectives (an association that may be even stronger than the status/intelligence

association). Perhaps focusing on those adjectives would provide stronger associations than those found with intelligence.

It may also be that the new methodology could be improved to better capture attitude shifts in individuals. There are two key places this improvement can happen: the explicit measure and the priming television clips. First, the early participants in the experiment showed ceiling effects in their evaluation ratings of the RA. The RA was given the highest rating on the 7-point semantic differential scale for every adjective. Because of this effect, the first several participants were dropped from analysis and an instruction was added emphasizing the importance of honest ratings where the highest rating indicated excellence and a more middle rating (e.g. 5) indicated a good score. Once this instruction was added, participants started giving more varied (though still high) scores. Even with the shift down into the 5 to 6 range, smaller shifts in attitude may not be fully captured when a scale is seven points. Studies in psychology show that a 1 to 7 scale is favored in terms of participant usability and comparability to other studies and, as seen in the baseline analysis, fully captures language attitudes differences between accent groups. Still, a more sensitive measure less prone to ceiling effects may be necessary moving forward as the semantic differential scale may not have fully captured the explicit attitude change within individuals. It may be prudent to explore other explicit attitudes measures in the future. It is also notable that, in most cases, evaluation average ratings were above the middle score of 4. When the ASE-accented RA is being rated lower on competence, for example, that usually means he was rated in the 5-6 range rather than the 6-7 range. Thus, the RA is not being judged as incompetent, just less competent.

Another option to counter ceiling effects would be to incorporate a mistake on the part of the RA. This strategy is utilized within psychology research. For instance, Coyne, Archer, and Eslea (2004) measured the effects of direct and indirect aggression in media using participant ratings towards a research confederate. The research confederate was told to act arrogant and demeaning towards the group of participants (all middle school students) as he took up a short but difficult puzzle test that was supposedly part of the experiment. He made comments about other groups doing better on the test, saying the data from the present group is useless. After the

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confederate leaves the room, groups of participants watch either a media clip with direct

aggression, indirect aggression, or a control non-aggressive clip. Participants were later told the confederate was up for a raise and asked several questions about how much money the

confederate should get and if the confederate should be rehired the next year. Students in both aggression conditions gave the confederate lower evaluative ratings overall than those in the no- aggression condition. Those in the no-aggression condition also recommended more money for a raise (£25.85 out of a possible 100) compared to those in the direct and indirect aggression conditions, who recommended £14.71 and £7.33 respectively. This study shows not only the influence of aggressive media, but also lower ratings overall of an individual who exhibits a negative trait. On a 5-point Likert scale, the mean ratings for the confederate were 2.51, 1.78, and 1.75 for the no-aggression, direct aggression, and indirect aggression groups. These ratings are well below the rating ceiling of 5. The inclusion of a negative attribute that affects the participants, then, led to low ratings. The effect of the negative interaction was so strong that it influenced ratings that were thought to have a direct effect on how much money the confederate would get and how likely he was to be rehired. Thus, incorporation of a mistake or negative attribute should counter ceiling effects that appeared in the present experiment. A mistake made by an ASE-accented RA when a participant is primed with the unintelligence stereotype may be punished more harshly in ratings than by those primed with the intelligence counterstereotype, particularly if the mistake costs the participant time.

I would also like to highlight here the lower overall ratings in the baseline compared to the evaluation. In Chapter 4, I proposed one of the reasons for the difference in pre and post IAT score differences may be that the posttest score has an association with accented speakers rather than an abstract accent. Participants had been exposed to characters reflecting that ASE accents reach beyond abstract voices and belong to people with varying backgrounds/situations. I also highlighted this as a potential reason behind the lack of significant results in previous studies of media influence on attitudes. The result in this chapter provides stronger support for this

proposal. Participants had to be instructed to give stricter ratings when they were rating an actual accented speaker compared to the abstract voices they heard in the baseline. Though they were told the speakers in the baseline were actors they would be hearing later in the experiment, the content of the baseline passage did not reflect nuances of different characters and situations. These implications will be discussed more in Chapter 6.

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As was potentially the case in the implicit study, the television clips may not have provided a strong enough short-term prime. More explicit references to intelligence may be necessary, though finding those clips in television scripts may prove difficult (or perhaps not with the prevalence of the stereotype). Perhaps sustained consumption of these linguistic stereotypes would lead to a different outcome. The patterns in the Southern television variable may support this explanation and additionally support a third explanation: that other variables (e.g. speaker information, perceived realism, demographic variables) mediate uptake of language attitudes.