The Linguistic Expectancy Bias and the American Mass Media

Abstract

Socially salient information (such as stereotypes and expectancies) can be transmitted amongst individuals in a variety of subtle ways. One of these is the Linguistic Expectancy Bias (LEB), in which patterns of linguistic abstraction indirectly indicate a speaker's attitudes toward a target. The LEB is a common feature of human communication, but research on it has largely been limited to the laboratory; its presence in news media reports is not well-studied. In three studies, I investigate the operation of the LEB in the print media domain. In the first, published reports of NFL games between intercity rivals were analyzed to determine whether or not hometown teams receive more favorable linguistic treatment than hated rivals; results indicate no evidence of a systematic LEB effect. In the second, news reports about the 2004 Presidential election were examined for differential coverage based on the party membership of the candidates, with no evidence of linguistic bias discovered. In the third, participants were exposed to a description of a politician that varies in the levels of abstraction used to describe his actions and asked to form impressions of him. Linguistic bias was found to have a subtly paradoxical effect, such that bias against a candidate resulted in greater explicit and implicit liking for him. Implications for both the social psychology and political science literatures are discussed.