PsychWordVec (version 2025.3)

test_RND: Relative Norm Distance (RND) analysis.

Description

Tabulate data and conduct the permutation test of significance for the Relative Norm Distance (RND; also known as Relative Euclidean Distance). This is an alternative method to Single-Category WEAT.

Usage

test_RND(
  data,
  T1,
  A1,
  A2,
  use.pattern = FALSE,
  labels = list(),
  p.perm = TRUE,
  p.nsim = 10000,
  p.side = 2,
  seed = NULL
)

Value

A list object of new class rnd:

words.valid

Valid (actually matched) words

words.not.found

Words not found

data.raw

A data.table of (absolute and relative) norm distances

eff.label

Description for the difference between the two attribute concepts

eff.type

Effect type: RND

eff

Raw effect and p value (if p.perm=TRUE)

eff.interpretation

Interpretation of the RND score

Arguments

data

A wordvec (data.table) or embed (matrix), see data_wordvec_load.

T1

Target words of a single category (a vector of words or a pattern of regular expression).

A1, A2

Attribute words (a vector of words or a pattern of regular expression). Both must be specified.

use.pattern

Defaults to FALSE (using a vector of words). If you use regular expression in T1, T2, A1, and A2, please specify this argument as TRUE.

labels

Labels for target and attribute concepts (a named list), such as (the default) list(T1="Target", A1="Attrib1", A2="Attrib2").

p.perm

Permutation test to get exact or approximate p value of the overall effect. Defaults to TRUE. See also the sweater package.

p.nsim

Number of samples for resampling in permutation test. Defaults to 10000.

If p.nsim is larger than the number of all possible permutations (rearrangements of data), then it will be ignored and an exact permutation test will be conducted. Otherwise (in most cases for real data and always for SC-WEAT), a resampling test is performed, which takes much less computation time and produces the approximate p value (comparable to the exact one).

p.side

One-sided (1) or two-sided (2) p value. Defaults to 2.

In Caliskan et al.'s (2017) article, they reported one-sided p value for WEAT. Here, I suggest reporting two-sided p value as a more conservative estimate. The users take the full responsibility for the choice.

• The one-sided p value is calculated as the proportion of sampled permutations where the difference in means is greater than the test statistic.

• The two-sided p value is calculated as the proportion of sampled permutations where the absolute difference is greater than the test statistic.

seed

Random seed for reproducible results of permutation test. Defaults to NULL.

Download

Download pre-trained word vectors data (.RData): https://psychbruce.github.io/WordVector_RData.pdf

References

Garg, N., Schiebinger, L., Jurafsky, D., & Zou, J. (2018). Word embeddings quantify 100 years of gender and ethnic stereotypes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(16), E3635--E3644.

Bhatia, N., & Bhatia, S. (2021). Changes in gender stereotypes over time: A computational analysis. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 45(1), 106--125.

See Also

tab_similarity

dict_expand

dict_reliability

test_WEAT

Examples

rnd = test_RND(
  demodata,
  labels=list(T1="Occupation", A1="Male", A2="Female"),
  T1=cc("
    architect, boss, leader, engineer, CEO, officer, manager,
    lawyer, scientist, doctor, psychologist, investigator,
    consultant, programmer, teacher, clerk, counselor,
    salesperson, therapist, psychotherapist, nurse"),
  A1=cc("male, man, boy, brother, he, him, his, son"),
  A2=cc("female, woman, girl, sister, she, her, hers, daughter"),
  seed=1)
rnd