The main aim of the STERHEOTYPES project is to promote awareness of the psychological processes emerging from racial hoaxes, in particular in new digital generations, by fruitfully combining methodological approaches coming from psychology and computational linguistics. Scholars in three Mediterranean European countries are involved: France, Italy and Spain. In particular, the psychological team will perform experimental studies in educational contexts with the aim of understanding the socio-psychological processes raising from online racial hoaxes leading stereotypes and prejudice . The computational linguistics teams will examine stereotypes and prejudices from a cross-cultural perspective by analysing multilingual corpora related to racial hoaxes in different countries, collected from online newspapers and social media, and from students interacting in controlled settings with a tailored app created for the project.
The main research questions we would like to address are the following:
1. What kind of racial hoaxes can affect young people’s prejudices and anti-immigrants attitudes?
2. What are the psychological features that make young people more easily influenced by miscommunication within the social medias?
3. What are the cross-cultural differences in the stereotypes elicited by racial hoaxes?
4. What are the linguistic patterns that emerge in online expressions of stereotypes and prejudice in the different languages? What are their geographical fluxes and distribution?
5. What is the role of affective content in determining the spread of racial hoaxes?
6. What social dynamics characterize the diffusion of hoaxes and stereotypes?
7. What educational strategies supported by innovative tools can be applied in collaboration with teachers to overcome the stereotypes emerging from fake information?