Outside the laboratory: The linguistic intergroup bias in a natural multiple-comparison setting

This chapter reviews the literature on the Linguistic Intergroup Bias and reports an empirical contribution in which the linguistic discrimination phenomenon is analyzed in a real life intergroup setting 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 perceived ingroup and 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 against than informal and sports groups. Furthmore, more entitative outgroups were described in a less biased fashion. The implications of these results for the generality and pervasiveness of linguistic intergroup discrimination in real life settings are discussed.