Advancing in life: The role of language abstraction in promoting school and professional career

Conceiving language as a tool that couples cognition and action is particularly relevant when judgements and beliefs about others are translated into school or professional evaluations. In two studies we addressed the role of language abstraction in composing evaluations about primary school pupils and applicants for a job position. Study 1 aimed to explore whether successful and unsuccessful pupils are differentiated through an evaluation linguistic bias. We compared the level of abstraction of the terms used by teachers to formulate final evaluations about pupils and their numerical marks. Results showed that pupils with higher grades were described with positive terms at a more abstract level and negative terms at a more concrete level than those with lower grades. Study 2 aimed to find a similar bias in the context of job selection and to examine whether this tendency is amplified when evaluations are made by groups rather than by their individual members. By comparing individual and group judgments about job applicants we found a selection linguistic bias for both types of judgements, such that selected applicants were described with positive terms at a more abstract level and negative terms at a more concrete level than rejected ones. Moreover, this tendency was amplified from individual to group language use. Implications of these results are discussed considering the cognitive inferences and the motivational consequences of the language whereby we are evaluated.