This was a neat study, but the authors really do throw around a number of speculative and unsupported claims in the discussion about linguistic relativity/deter

This was a neat study, but the authors really do throw around a number of speculative and unsupported claims in the discussion about linguistic relativity/determinism. > Our findings are also sure to contribute to the debate concerning the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (17), because our work suggests that behavior can be driven by cultural history embedded in a term’s historic use. Such histories can evidently vary between languages. No, not really. Linguistic relativity makes a claim about the direction of causation--from language to thought. This study does nothing to test the direction of causation, which is usually considered possible only with controlled experiments. This chicken and egg debate has been going on for the better part of the last century--it is not an easy problem. > Our results also suggest a null hypothesis for explaining origins of prejudicial behavior in humans, namely, the implicit transmission of ingroup/outgroup identity information through language. That is, before providing an explicit or institutional explanation for why individuals make prejudiced decisions, one must show that it was not a simple outcome of unthinking reproduction of statistical regularities absorbed with language. Once again, this was not an experiment capable of producing causal evidence. The authors have shown that human biases can be replicated by statistical learning of language corpora--admirable work, but nothing new here for Sapir-Whorf.