How You Describe a Group Shows How Biased You Are: Language Abstraction and Inferences About a Speaker’s Communicative Intentions and Attitudes Toward a Group

The aim of the present research was to show that the level of linguistic abstraction used when describing group behaviors affects inferences about the speaker’s degree of bias toward that group. Participants used a speaker’s description of a group to judge that person’s communicative intentions (Study 1) and attitudes (Study 2) toward the group. The results show that speakers who use abstract terms are perceived as more biased than speakers who use concrete terms.