From social psychology to cognitive sociolinguistics : the self-serving bias and interplay with gender and modesty in language use

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