An Extended Chinese Social Evaluative Word List

Social evaluation, i.e., people's views of self, others, and groups, is ubiquitous and embedded in our language. In turn, social evaluative words are used intensively in studies of human social evaluation. However, standardized Chinese word lists for social evaluation are under-developed; the only available word lists are based on the big-two model of social evaluation (i.e., agency and warmth) and cover small numbers of words. To fill the gap, we conducted a survey with a relatively large sample (n = 1270, 50% female) and a large number of words (1908) that might describe extended social evaluative dimensions: appearance, socioeconomic status, sociability, competence, and morality. The participants rated the extent to which each word described a certain social evaluation dimension and how positive/negative each word was. Based on this dataset, we selected words that dominantly describe one of the five above-mentioned dimensions. The final word list has 1040 words, including 245 appearance words (143 positive, 11 neutral, 91 negative), 108 socioeconomic status words (36 positive, 2 neutral, 70 negative), 93 sociability words (53 positive, 5 neutral, 35 negative), 261 competence words (185 positive, 4 neutral, 72 negative), and 333 morality words (149 positive, 1 neutral, 183 negative). This word list provides an extended Chinese social evaluative word list and will serve as a useful resource for researchers in social psychology, linguistics, sociology, and computational social science.