Intergroup attributions differ in the abstractness of language used

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”). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1287

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the linguistic intergroup bias mechanism clearly with concrete examples.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”