Identity and Informational Differences in Concept Relations for Social-Societal Institutions

Social groups represent a collective identity defined by a distinct consensus of concepts (e.g., ideas, values, and goals) whose structural relationship varies between groups. Here we set out to measure the geometry of inter-concept semantic associations, what we refer to as a concept graph, and see how it covaries between established social groups, based on racial identity, and how this effect is mediated by information ecosystems, contextualized as news sources. Group differences among racial identity (278 Black and 294 White Americans) and informational ecosystems (Left- and Right- leaning news sources) are present in subjective judgments of how the meaning of concepts such as healthcare, police, and voting relate to each other. These racial group differences in concept graphs were partially mediated by the bias of news sources that individuals get their information from. This supports the idea of groups being defined by common conceptual semantic relationships that partially arise from shared information ecosystems.