Prossimo evento:
Il prossimo Gender Lunch Seminar “Who's pain is actually extreme? The Effect of Identity and Intensifiers on Physicians’ Perceptions of Pain”, in collaborazione con il Centro di Ricerca di Epistemologia Sperimentale e Applicata, si terrà online mercoledì 13 maggio, dalle ore 16:00 alle ore 17:00.
Relatrice: Raef Khan (Northwestern University)
Abstract:
Little work has been conducted on how physicians’ differing perceptions of patients and their pain based on their race and gender can be influenced by a patient’s linguistic choices. Using a matched guise task, physicians read various patient’s self-reports of symptoms either with or without intensifiers (e.g., extreme) and were asked to rate the patient’s pain and evaluate the patient’s trustworthiness and communicativeness. Crucially, results illustrate that physicians interpreted intensifiers differently depending on a patient’s gender, such that the rating difference between bare and intense statements for women was greater than the difference for men. However, no difference in patient evaluations was found. These findings show the influence of social information on linguistic meaning-making, highlighting the interconnectivity between social variation and pragmatic reasoning.
