ABSTRACT
Prejudiced communication is everywhere (Ruscher, 2001). Not only does it rear its ugly head explicitly, for instance in the case of sexist jokes, but it may also show up in much more implicit ways. Research on biased language use has demonstrated that people show subtle linguistic biases as a function of prejudiced thoughts, stereotypes, and expectancies (for overviews see Maass, 1999; Wigboldus & Douglas, 2007). For instance, it has been demonstrated that positive in-group and negative out-group behaviors are described at a higher level of linguistic abstraction (e.g., “The in-group member is intelligent,” “The outgroup member is stupid”) than positive out-group and negative in-group behaviors (e.g., “The out-group member gave the right answer to the question,” “The in-group member gave the wrong answer to the question”). This form of biased language use is named “the linguistic intergroup bias” (LIB; Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, & Semin, 1989). Research into this fascinating phenomenon has been very fruitful over the past two decades or so.
