Desirable ingroup acts are described abstractly, undesirable ones concretely

Evidence

A second new direction in research on linguistic factors in prejudice, one not anticipated by Allport in The Nature of Prejudice, involves the way that people make different types of attributions for the behaviors of ingroup and outgroup members. This approach is represented by research on the linguistic intergroup bias (Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, & Semin, 1989), which involves the tendencies to describe ingroup and outgroup behaviors at different levels of abstractness. Specifically, desirable ingroup and undesirable outgroup behaviors tend to be communicated more abstractly (e.g., “we are helpful,” “they are aggressive”), while undesirable ingroup and desirable outgroup behaviors tend to be communicated more concretely (e.g., “we pulled their hair,” “they opened the door”). — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1287

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the linguistic intergroup bias — how grammatical abstractness encodes group-serving attribution of behavior.
• XREF: Relates to the biased-attribution findings in the reader’s knowledge of intergroup conflict literature.