Most investigations in this field have been concerned with a comparison majority and minority groups. They invariably find that both types of group hold common stereotypes; pro-majority and anti-minority (e.g. Lambert et al., 1960 with English and French Canadians; Steckler, 1957 with Whites and Negroes; Adelson, 1953 with Gentiles and Jews.) The present study was designed in an attempt to determine whether or not two groups of roughly equal proportions would yield similar results. One of the groups used came from the north of England, the other from the south.
METHODS
Subjects
Ss were taken from 110 students attending a psychology lecture course. Of these sixteen had spent the greater part of their lives in counties north of Staffordshire (our arbitrary cut-off point for the northern group). These were matched as far as was possible in terms of sex, age and course of study with sixteen students from London and the home counties.
Apparatus and procedure
The material used in the experiment was the tape-recorded voices of two speakers each reading the same passage with a Yorkshire and a London accent. Both speakers were able to assume realistic accents and were able to maintain them consistently over the 2½ min required to read the passage. One speaker was a Londoner and the other a Yorkshireman. Several recordings of the passage were made by the speakers and the best selected.
The major difficulty with this type of procedure is that the speakers might project a particular type of personality when they assume an accent. In the present study, attempts to control for this factor were made in two ways. Firstly, a very neutral, factual passage was used. Secondly, the speakers were directed to try to assume the same personality in both instances.
After the four voices had been recorded, a preliminary study was carried out to ascertain whether or not it was recognizable that only two people were reading the passage. No S realized that this was the case.
During the experiment, Ss were required to complete a questionnaire, rating each speaker on various personality traits immediately after they had heard him. Eighteen pairs of traits were used, in each case separated by a five-point scale, e.g.
Generous 1 2 3 4 5 Mean
Ss circled the number which they thought most appropriate. The traits used were a combination of some of those used by Lambert et al. (1960) and Asch (1946). They are listed in Table 1.
Table 1. Personality traits
The following order of presentation of voices was selected randomly.
Voice 1: Londoner-Yorkshire accent
Voice 2: Yorkshireman-London accent
Voice 3: Londoner-London accent
Voice 4: Yorkshireman-Yorkshire accent
RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
For each S two difference scores were obtained. Thus, for each speaker and each pair of traits, the ratings given to his Yorkshire accent were subtracted from those given to his London accent. For a particular trait, the two difference scores were summed for each S and then over the sixteen Ss. Student's t-tests were used to investigate the departure of the difference scores from zero for each trait and for both groups of Ss. After this, again for each trait, the means of the difference scores for the two groups were compared using t-tests.
Analysis of the difference scores for the two groups showed nothing of statistical significance. However, when the groups were considered separately and their difference scores investigated to see if they diverged significantly from zero, certain traits proved significant. These are shown in Tables 2 and 3.
Table 2. Mean ratings made by northern subjects
(L = London accents; Y = Yorkshire accents)
Table 3. Mean ratings made by southern subjects
(L = London accents; Y = Yorkshire accents)
The means of the ratings given to the Yorkshire and London accents were estimated so that if a significant difference were obtained it could be seen on which side of the neutral value (i.e. three) the scores lay. Thus, for example, on trait fourteen northern Ss rated both types of speaker as being reliable but the Yorkshire speakers as being significantly more reliable than the London speakers.
DISCUSSION
The results show that there is no significant difference between the ratings of northern and southern Ss on any of the eighteen traits. This finding agrees with the earlier studies where majority and minority groups in the same cultural background have been found to hold common stereotyped views. Thus these earlier experimental results have been extended to show that two groups with approximately the same cultural background, neither of them being a majority or minority group, also tend to hold similar stereotyped views.
When the results from the two groups of Ss were analysed separately to see if they rated the Yorkshire and London accents differently, the following conclusions could be drawn. Both groups judged the Yorkshire speakers to be more honest and reliable than the London speakers and the London speakers to be more self-confident than the Yorkshire. Northerners judged the Yorkshire speakers to be more industrious and southerners judged them to be more serious than the London speakers. Northerners also judged the Yorkshire speakers to be more generous, good-natured and kind-hearted than the London speakers, whom they rated as slightly more mean, irritable and hard.
These results do not seem to favour either the Yorkshire or the London speakers, possibly again because neither of these groups is seen as a particular majority group. This is in contrast with the earlier studies where both the majority and minority groups held common stereotypes which favoured the former and were prejudiced against the latter.
The authors are indebted to Dr R. Brown and Mr M. A. Gale of the Psychology Department at Exeter University, for the excellent voice productions.
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Manuscript received 9 February 1966
Revised manuscript received 20 October 1966
