Linguistic intergroup bias: Differential expectancies or in-group protection?

The linguistic intergroup bias describes the tendency to communicate positive in-group and negative out-group behaviors more abstractly than negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors. This article investigated whether this bias is driven by differential expectancies or by in-group protective motives. In Exp 1, northern and southern Italian participants (N=151) described positive and negative behaviors of northern or southern protagonists that were either congruent or incongruent with stereotypic expectancies. Regardless of valence, expectancy-congruent behaviors were described more abstractly than incongruent ones. Exp 2 (N=40) showed that language is used in an equally biased fashion for individuals as previously demonstrated for groups. Exp 3 (N=192) induced expectancies experimentally and found greater abstraction for expectancy-congruent behaviors regardless of valence. All experiments confirmed the differential expectancy approach