Linguistic Intergroup Bias:Stereotype perpetuation through language

Prejudice and stereotyping have always been a prominent topic in social psychology, but until recently very little attention has been paid to the role of language in the transmission and maintenance of stereotypes. According to the author, if we want to understand how stereotypes function and how they become shared knowledge in a given society, we need to understand not only the cognitive and motivational processes by which they are driven but also the way in which they are transmitted. Over the past decade, the author has investigated one aspect of language, namely language abstraction, that may play a subtle but potentially important role in stereotype transmission and maintenance. It is the goal of this chapter to describe this research program as it developed over the past years, to discuss its implications, and to propose extensions of the model to related areas.