Linguistic Intergroup Bias (LIB)

Linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) is the tendency of speakers to describe the actions of individuals at different abstraction levels depending on the actor's group membership and the valence of the action. For example, imagine that you are watching your favorite basketball team and one of the players makes a slam dunk. A few minutes later, a member of the opposing team also dunks the ball. Would you describe these two actions in exactly the same way? What if the player's action was negative, such as committing a foul? Researchers have discovered that in addition to directly expressing our thoughts and feelings about other individuals (e.g., by labeling them as heroes or villains), we can use more subtle ways to convey our opinions, such as varying ...