Outside the Laboratory: The Linguistic Intergroup Bias in a Natural Multiple-Comparison Setting

This chapter reviews the literature on the Linguistic Intergroup Bias and presents an empirical contribution in which the linguistic discrimination phenomenon is analyzed in a real life intergroup setting and by adopting a multiple comparison framework. Specifically, adolescents - members of sports, religious, political and spontaneous peer-groups - freely described the ingroup and a variety of meaningful outgroups. The relationship between linguistic discrimination and the perceived ingroup-outgroup entitativity was also studied. Besides highlighting a strong ingroup favouritism, the results showed that descriptions of the outgroups were not all alike: Political and religious groups were more discriminated than informal and sports groups. Furthermore, the outgroups perceived as being more entitative were described in a less biased fashion. The implications of these results for the generality and persuasiveness of linguistic intergroup discrimination in real life settings are discussed.