#66: Your Language Shapes Your Opinions with Efrén Pérez

Opinion Science

Efrén Pérez is a professor is a professor of Political Science and Psychology at UCLA. He studies political attitudes and behaviors among various racial and ethnic groups in the United States. With Margit Tavits, he recently co-wrote the book Voicing Politics: How Language Shapes Public Opinion. The book is a fascinating summary of research they have conducted testing how the unique characteristics of the language your speak can shape your political opinions. Languages around the world differ in their emphasis on gender or on the future, which shapes how speakers think in those terms. Languages also carry meaning as to their status in society, which can also affect people's opinions about race and ethnicity.

In our conversation, Efrén shares how he got interested in language, what they've found in this research, and what questions they're tackling now.

Some things that come up in our conversation

• How a language organizes its words for color can shape color perception (Roberson et al., 2005)
• Language and opinion toward gender and LGBT equality (Perez & Tavits, 2019a; Tavits & Perez, 2019)
• Language's use of future tense and opinions of distant dilemmas (Perez & Tavits, 2017)
• Language status and the salience of ethnic divisions (Perez & Tavits, 2019b)
• The value of "Latinx" (Vicuña & Pérez, in press)

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