Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916

RESEARCH ARTICLE

News Media’s Relationship With

Stereotyping: The Linguistic Intergroup
Bias in Response to Crime News
Bradley W. Gorham
S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244

This paper examines the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) in the context of people’s inter-
pretations of a race-related television news story. The LIB suggests that people use more
abstract language to describe stereotype-congruent behaviors, particularly when that per-
son is a member of an out-group. This study of 208 White adults manipulates the race
of a suspect in a TV news crime story and examines how race influences the abstract-
ness of the language viewers use to describe the suspect. The findings offer support for
the LIB being induced by crime news and show that news media use is significantly
related to the presence of the LIB. This suggests that stereotypical news coverage may
subtly influence the interpretations people make about members of other social groups.

doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00020.x

Mass communication researchers and social psychologists often point to the mass
media as an important source of stereotypical images, with the assumption that these
images produce or reinforce prejudice and discrimination on the part of audiences.
For example, Allport (1954/1979) noted back in 1954 that U.S. newspaper stories
that describe criminals as Negroes will likely affect the audience’s perception of
African Americans: ‘‘Yet so frequently to associate Negro with crime is bound to
leave a lasting effect on readers, particularly if this association is not offset by news
items favorable to the colored group’’ (p. 201). Devine and Elliot (1995) note that
‘‘stereotypic images of Blacks persist in the dominant media .. As a result, stereo-
types are perpetuated within the culture in subtle, yet highly effectual ways’’ (p.
1149). Such assumptions are not only intuitively appealing but also seem reasonable
in light of the findings of cultivation research. Research from this perspective has
generally shown a small but consistent relationship between the amount of television
viewed and beliefs about the social world (Morgan & Shanahan, 1997; Potter, 1994)
such that frequent viewers of television tend to believe that the real world is similar to
the world that is portrayed on television. Given that television systematically distorts

Corresponding author: Bradley W. Gorham; e-mail: bwgorham@syr.edu.

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Linguistic Intergroup Bias B. W. Gorham

these portrayals in ways that favor social elites (see Greenberg, Mastro, & Brand,
2002), cultivation researchers argue that television is an important tool for main-
taining dominant ideology (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Signorielli, & Shanahan, 2002).
Although many content analyses have uncovered the rich and complex ways that
media texts might support dominant understandings of race, power, and society,
they cannot by themselves tell us whether the messages are really having these effects
among viewers and are truly performing the ideological work ascribed to them
(Gorham, 1999). Similarly, one of the enduring criticisms of classic cultivation
research is that without specifying the mechanisms that lead from television expo-
sure to effect, even this important stream of research is open to questions of spuri-
ousness (Hawkins & Pingree, 1990). Thus, in order to better understand the ways in
which media help maintain stereotyping and prejudice in a society that is less
tolerant of outright bigotry (Devine & Elliott, 1995), we need to look more closely
at how people interact with mass media messages about race.
Recent research in our field has used the tools of social psychology to uncover the
various ways people interact with media content involving race (e.g., see Oliver,
Jackson, Moses, & Dangerfield, 2004). This attention to how audiences process
media messages is especially important given that people can react to ambiguous
information in stereotype-congruent ways, even when they consciously reject prej-
udice (Devine, 1989; Monteith, 1993). In addition, although overt bigotry has gen-
erally declined in the United States, some researchers suggest that it has been
replaced by a more subtle form of modern racism. Gaertner and Dovidio (1986),
for example, present evidence for what they call ‘‘aversive racism,’’ characterized by
Whites maintaining both sympathetic views for the plight African Americans have
had to endure with feelings of discomfort or disdain for Blacks. Thus, in a world
where mass media offer contradictory images of African Americans as both success-
ful news anchors and dangerous criminals on the same newscast (Entman, 1990),
people may well hold contradictory beliefs about minorities. Media images may
contribute to the maintenance of subtle racism without audience members even
being aware of it.
This paper examines how Americans’ reactions to messages about race can reveal
the complex and subtle ways that media use is related to the perception of difference
between people of various social groups. More specifically, this paper focuses on
linguistic intergroup bias (LIB), defined as the use of different levels of abstractness
in language depending on whether a person is talking about someone who belongs to
an in-group or an out-group and whether that person is behaving in a way consistent
with the group’s stereotype. Only by better understanding the interpretations of
race-related news, can we figure out how to help news producers and news audiences
avoid reinforcing negative stereotypes.

Groups and social knowledge

People tend to divide themselves into reasonably coherent groups. What is at issue is
not the presence of human groups but the differences people see between themselves

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B. W. Gorham Linguistic Intergroup Bias

and members of other social groups. As opposed to those who assert that social
groupings reflect naturally existing co-occurrences in the environment (see Rosch,
1978), Wittenbrink, Hilton, and Gist (1998) argue that the perception of differences
in the social environment is the result of people applying ‘‘naive theories’’ about the
existence of coherent categories onto the people they see around them. People’s lay
theories about the world, they argue, suggest not only that people can be divided into
groups, but also that there are explanations for these divisions. They therefore ‘‘see’’
coherent categories among others and organize their social knowledge around these
perceived differences. ‘‘These theories provide subjective explanations that structure
the social environment and define the partitions the perceiver imposes upon it. They
explain what a given group of people is like, what attributes the group members
share, and, more importantly, why they share these attributes’’ (Wittenbrink et al.,
1998, p. 49).
Explanations about social groups rarely reflect people’s direct experiences with
groups, and so they are more likely found in the social knowledge shared by members
of a culture. This view of social categorization allows for the functioning of ideology
in the differentiation of social groups and the stereotypes that describe them. Indeed,
concern for the relationship of stereotypes, social group categorization, and existing
structures of power and dominance were part of both Lippmann’s (1922) and
Allport’s (1954/1979) use of the term ‘‘stereotype.’’ In his definition, Allport noted
that a stereotype’s purpose ‘‘is to justify (rationalize) one’s conduct in relation to the
category’’ (p. 191). Stereotypes, then, represent a link between the categories we use
to define the social world and the power structures that govern that world. As van
Dijk (1987) argues
Ideologies organize large portions of our social life and are based on fundamental goals,
interests, and values . . Hence, ideologies are the cognitive reflections of our social, political,
economic, and cultural ‘‘position’’ within the social structure . . This means that ideologies,
even less than their component attitudes, are not individual, but group based. (p. 194)

Thus, ideology in this cognitive sense is the practice of our individual experiences
and raw perceptions (the episodes of our lives) being defined by socially constructed
semantic knowledge, with those definitions supporting existing structures of differ-
ence. Our perceptions serve our group interests by making attributes in the social
environment that might explain differences perceptually salient. For example, Wit-
tenbrink et al. (1998) contend that there is nothing in the environment that naturally
makes race the basis of group differentiation. Indeed, this was not the case for a long
time: Race was not seen as an important marker of distinction in ancient Egypt or
Greece, and race as a biological explanation for difference was not posited until the
slave trade came under increasing intellectual and economic attack (Montagu, 1997).
Thus, it was the operation of ideology that ‘‘created’’ race as a salient characteristic by
which to group people.
This perspective is given added weight in light of the findings of social identity
theory and research on the attribution error. According to social identity theory

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Linguistic Intergroup Bias B. W. Gorham

(Tajfel & Turner, 1986), people’s self-concept involves beliefs about their own abil-
ities and their perceptions of the social groups to which they belong. Because people
wish to maintain a positive social identity, they will strive to create favorable
comparisons between their in-groups and out-groups when their social identity is
threatened (Crocker & Luhtanen, 1990; Perdue, Dovidio, Gurtman, & Tyler, 1990).
Thus, people denigrate the out-group in an attempt to make the in-group look
better. Research also highlights another aspect of this intergroup dynamic: Members
of the out-group are seen as being relatively homogeneous, in that the attributes that
are said to belong to them are assumed to hold for most members of that group. In-
groups, in contrast, are assumed to feature more variety among members (Linville,
Salovey, & Fischer, 1986).
The ultimate attribution error (Pettigrew, 1979), in contrast, attempts to explain
the behaviors of in-groups and out-groups as functions of either internal or external
causes. Pettigrew built on Heider’s (1958) concept of the fundamental attribution
error by showing that people who perceive a person performing a negative behavior
will be more likely to attribute that behavior to dispositional (internal) explanations
if the person is from an out-group, whereas they will attribute the same negative
behavior to situational (external) factors if performed by an in-group member.
Likewise, positive behaviors will likely be attributed to situational causes when
performed by out-group members and dispositional causes when performed by
members of the in-group. There appears to be a preference for attributions that help
serve the interests of the in-group (Hewstone, 1990).
In this context, our beliefs about racial groups have a cognitive component that
predisposes us to recognize racial distinctions as salient and more readily attribute
negative behaviors performed by members of other racial groups as being reflective
of the group as a whole. Because our stereotypes about these groups are stored as
simply another type of schema, they are subject to all the processing characteristics
that seem to involve all schema: They aid in parsing incoming information, they can
be primed, they help structure expectancies, and they can direct our perception of
subsequent information. But as has already been mentioned, these schema reflect the
operation of ideology in the social environment and thus reflect the distinctions that
we apply to the human groups we encounter.
Communication research has highlighted the ability of stereotypical media con-
tent to prime particular explanations for the behaviors shown in that content.
Gilliam, Iyengar, Simon, and Wright (1996) manipulated the race of a suspect in
a crime story to examine the effects this manipulation would have on television
viewers. Subjects were shown a 15-minute segment of a local newscast, including
a crime story in which the mug shot of the suspect was ‘‘painted’’ to alter the suspect’s
complexion. Following the newscast, subjects completed a lengthy questionnaire that
included questions about the causes and significance of crime, their preferred
methods for dealing with the problem, and their stereotypes of various social groups,
including African Americans (p. 16). Gilliam et al. (1996) found a significant main
effect for the race of the suspect. Subjects expressed more concern for crime and were

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B. W. Gorham Linguistic Intergroup Bias

more likely to attribute the causes of crime to group characteristics for the African
American suspects compared to the White suspects.
Johnson, Adams, Hall, and Ashburn (1997) also included a measure of attribu-
tion in their priming experiment; they were interested in how the level of violence in
a story might prime readers to evaluate a subsequent African American defendant
differently than a White defendant. Given that hostility is a prominent part of the
stereotype of Black men (see Devine & Elliot, 1995), Johnson et al. (1997) suggested
that if people are primed to think about violence, they may evaluate an African
American defendant differently than a White defendant. Violence should trigger
the Black stereotype when viewers encounter an African American defendant
and lead to more dispositional attributions for African American suspects than for
White suspects.
In what they thought was a perception and recall task, subjects in the Johnson
et al. (1997) study read three stories that either did or did not describe violent acts. In
a second study on ‘‘decision-making processes,’’ subjects read an irrelevant article
and an article that dealt with a man who was arrested for vandalizing automobiles.
The story included background information about the man and a photo of either
a Caucasian man or an African American man, or no photo (a race-unspecified con-
dition). Johnson et al. found that ‘‘attributions of defendant behavior did not vary as
a function of story violence level for the White and race-unspecified defendant. In
contrast, for Black defendants, attributions were more dispositional in the violent
condition than the nonviolent condition’’ (p. 85). Furthermore, attributions were
more dispositional overall for the Black defendant than either the White or the race-
unspecified defendant. Johnson et al. suggest that the primed information (violence)
is considered more applicable to Blacks than Whites because it is such a prominent
trait of the stereotype of African American men. Thus, the prime had more of an
effect when subjects subsequently read about an African American man because it
triggered the rest of the stereotype, leading to more dispositional attributions.
These results suggest that priming stereotypes of African Americans triggers
cognitive processing that follows the ultimate attribution error. This process thereby
enhances the ability of the news to produce not just stereotype-congruent interpre-
tations about an individual suspect but also interpretations about the larger group
that support dominant racial ideology.

Language and the structure of racial thought

It is thought by some linguists that the structure of language can reveal important
information about the structure of thought (Graesser, Gernsbacher, & Goldman,
1997; Lakoff, 1987; van Dijk, 1997). If that is the case, then the language people use in
connection with their intergroup encounters should reveal information about the
way groups are perceived. One potentially useful finding for communication
researchers comes from what Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, and Semin (1989) call the linguis-
tic intergroup bias, which is the use of different linguistic properties in inter-
group contexts. Between social groups with strong negative feelings for each other,

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Linguistic Intergroup Bias B. W. Gorham

Maass et al. (1989) found that speakers tend to use different types of language depend-
ing on the group involved (whether in-group or out-group) and the valence of the
behavior involved (positive or negative). Subjects in the Maass et al. study tended to
use more abstract language when describing a positive behavior of an in-group
member or the negative behavior of an out-group member. However, when describ-
ing a negative behavior of an in-group member or a positive behavior of an out-
group member, speakers tended to use more concrete language.
Language abstractness, first discussed in Semin and Fiedler (1988), is defined by
the use of four types of descriptors: descriptive action verbs (DAVs), considered the
most concrete; interpretive action verbs (IAVs); state verbs (SVs); and adjectives
(Adjs), which are the most abstract. Abstract language describes highly generalized
person dispositions, detached from specific and observable behaviors, and enduring
states (e.g., honest, creative, believe, envy). Concrete language, in contrast, describes
specific and observable behaviors with clear beginnings and ends, which may or may
not have semantic connotations (e.g., kiss, visit, help, threaten; Semin & Fiedler).
Furthermore, abstract language is seen as being more informative about the person
involved as abstract descriptions are seen as being more stable over time.
In an intergroup context, language abstractness can also be thought of as a marker
of situational or dispositional attribution for the observed behaviors. Concrete
descriptions of a behavior are bounded by the situation in which they occur. They
firmly locate the action in a specific place and time but do not tell us much about the
situation beyond that. Abstract language, in contrast, implies much more about the
disposition of the person involved that is independent of what has been observed. It
assumes that the observed behavior is a manifestation of a larger tendency, thus im-
plying that some knowledge exists about the person in question. If all that is different
about the person is the group to which he or she belongs, then abstract language
implies that knowledge about the social group can be applied to that specific person.
Language abstractness, then, can reveal the structure of thought about the group in
question as it can reveal the extent to which people think observed behaviors are tied
to the circumstances or instead are the result of inherent traits of that group.
Subsequent work by Maass, Milesi, Zabbini, and Stahlberg (1995) demonstrates
that the LIB is a function of the expectancies that stereotypes generate concerning
the likelihood of behaviors. If a behavior is seen as being consistent with what one
would expect given the stereotype, then the LIB is much more likely to occur. This
suggests that the LIB is the result of cognitive processing rather than the result of
motivational processing to favor an in-group, although they acknowledge that such
a finding does not mean that in-group favoritism is unimportant for language use.
Karpinski and von Hippel (1996) echo this finding by showing that the LIB helps
people maintain their expectancies despite the presence of incongruent information.
They conclude from this that the LIB should be viewed as part of the attributional
bias of intergroup perception.
Building on this idea, research has also looked at the LIB in relation to prejudice.
von Hippel, Sekaquaptewa, and Vargas (1997), for example, demonstrate that a

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B. W. Gorham Linguistic Intergroup Bias

measure based on the LIB can be used as an implicit measure of prejudice for both
African American and gender stereotypes. Schnake and Ruscher (1998) show that
high-prejudiced White subjects describe the stereotypical behaviors (both positive
and negative) of an African American using more abstract language compared to
low-prejudiced subjects. Furthermore, von Hippel et al. (1997) also found that their
LIB results were unrelated to an explicit measure of prejudice, suggesting that al-
though people may be able to control their explicit reactions to race, their cognitive
processing nonetheless reveals stereotype-congruent tendencies. This finding reflects
others from the psychological literature that stereotype-congruent cognitive process-
ing can coexist with conscious processing that is genuinely low in prejudice. Thus,
the LIB does indeed seem to reveal something important about the structure of
White people’s beliefs about African Americans.
Gorham (2002) applied the LIB to the study of audience reactions to a television
news crime story. In that study, White undergraduate students were first surveyed
about their perceptions and use of news media as well as their endorsement of
stereotypes and prejudice. A week later, participants were shown the first 10 minutes
of a newscast—a newscast in which the race of a suspect in a crime story was
manipulated—and then asked a series of questions about what they saw. Included
were open-ended questions concerning the suspect seen in the crime story. Gorham
compared the language used to describe the suspect by participants who had seen an
African American to the responses from subjects who had seen a White suspect. He
found evidence of the LIB in the participants’ open-ended responses to questions
about the suspect: A greater proportion of the descriptions were Adjs, the most
abstract descriptor, when the suspect was Black than when he was White. This result
suggests once again that cultural stereotypes of African Americans had been activated
in these White undergraduates by the crime story and that these stereotypes had
influenced how the students talked about the suspect.
That study, however, suffered from some questions about the reliability of the
coding as the coding of the more concrete DAVs and IAVs was unreliable.
Although coding open-ended responses for the LIB was not unprecedented, as
Schnake and Ruscher (1998) had also coded open-ended responses for the LIB, such
a method trades a certain level of reliability for the added richness of the data.
Scholars often measure the LIB by showing participants some stimulus material
and then asking them to choose from one of four descriptions of the event. These
descriptions correspond to the four levels of abstraction (e.g., (a) John hit her,
(b) John hurts her, (c) John hates her, and (d) John is aggressive) (Semin & Fiedler,
1988). Thus, the present study is an attempt to replicate the findings of the earlier
research using closed-ended items. Thus, the chief hypothesis for this study is:
H1: The language White participants choose to describe an African American suspect will be
more abstract than the language chosen to describe a White suspect.

In addition to looking for evidence of the LIB in people’s reactions to a specific

story, this study can also examine the relationship between news media use and the

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Linguistic Intergroup Bias B. W. Gorham

presence of the LIB. Can television news cultivate the perception of difference, as
revealed by the LIB? There is ample evidence that although entertainment television
may be more generous in its portrayals of African Americans today than it was in the
past (Greenberg et al., 2002), television news tends to portray African Americans and
other racial minorities in ways that support dominant stereotypes of race. In
a content analysis of Chicago local news programs, Entman (1992) found that
where statistical differences existed between portrayal of Whites and Blacks, the
difference was always in a direction that made Blacks appear threatening in some
way. For example, African American crimes reported in the news were more likely
to be violent or drug related, and the suspects were more likely to be shown in
physical custody, whereas less likely to be named or heard from than their White
counterparts. Similarly, African American political actors were much more likely to
be seen arguing that the government violated or should serve Black interests than
White political actors were seen promoting racial self-interest. Although acknowl-
edging the problems associated with making assumptions about effects from con-
tent analyses, Entman (1990, 1992) argues that patterns such as these may work to
support the development and maintenance of McConahay’s (1986) modern racism.
Findings from Romer, Jamieson, and de Coteau (1998) and Dixon and Linz
(2000b, 2000a) echo these same conclusions. Romer et al. (1998) examined the race
of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders presented in television news stories in Phil-
adelphia. By comparing the relative proportion of Whites and Blacks in these stories
to real life crime statistics for the same period, the researchers hoped to decipher
whether the patterns reported by Entman (1992) and others were the result of
realistic group conflict or the operation of dominant racial ideology in the form
of ethnic blame discourse. Their results replicated those of Entman in that non-
Whites were more often shown as perpetrators of crime and Whites were more often
shown as the victims; they also went a step further and ‘‘demonstrated that this
disparity could not be explained using typical rates of inter- and intragroup victim-
ization as reported by the police’’ (Romer et al., 1998, p. 298). The same pattern of
results was found in Dixon and Linz’s (2000b) study of television news in Los
Angeles and Orange Counties. Furthermore, Dixon and Linz (2000a) found that
Whites were overrepresented, and Blacks and Latinos underrepresented, as police
officers in television news stories about crime.
If the presence of the LIB is considered a marker of dominant ideology about
social groups by indicating the perception of difference based on group affiliation,
then we might expect that those who consume more television news would be more
likely to exhibit the LIB, that is, we would expect that, compared to people who
watch relatively little television news, those who watch more television news would
be exposed to more portrayals of Whites and Blacks in systematically different and
stereotypical ways. Such portrayals might cultivate the perception of Whites and
Blacks as different and hence strengthen the tendency to use more abstract language
following a story about a Black suspect. Although much of the research about
portrayals of African Americans in news has been done using local television news,

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B. W. Gorham Linguistic Intergroup Bias

there is some evidence that national news has also featured systematic differences
(Jamieson, 1992). Thus, the next hypotheses focus on the ability of television news to
cultivate the LIB.
H2: The LIB will be present for frequent users of local television news use but not for
relatively light users.
H3: The LIB will be present for frequent users of network television news use but not for
relatively light users.
H4: The LIB will be present for frequent users of cable television news use but not for
relatively light users.

However, it is less clear how other television programming in general might be

related to the LIB. Cultivation scholars (e.g., Gerbner et al., 2002) argue that,
although the percentage of African Americans on television has increased dramati-
cally since the 1980s (see Greenberg et al., 2002), the overall symbolic messages of
television programming have not changed very much. If Whites are still systemat-
ically portrayed in ways that support their dominance, then exposure to television in
general should support the development and maintenance of stereotypes and prej-
udice. Thus, cultivation would predict that people who watch more television should
be more likely to exhibit the LIB than less frequent viewers.
In contrast, one criticism of cultivation is its insistence on medium-level meas-
ures rather than on more content-specific ones (Potter, 1994). This criticism seems
especially relevant in light of the dynamic television environment of today as close to
80% of the households in America receive cable television and audiences are increas-
ingly fragmented across dozens of channels. There are also more, and more varied,
portrayals of people of color on television than ever before, so the relationship
between television viewing and the LIB may not be as straightforward as cultivation
researchers would posit. Thus, one research question is:

RQ1: What is the relationship between overall television viewing and the LIB?

Finally, this study also investigates the relationship between the LIB and other
news sources. Although crime news has been a staple of the newspaper since the era
of the Penny Press, we should not automatically assume that newspapers reflect
television news’ racial disparities and lead to more stereotypical processing. Because
newspaper use has often been associated with increased knowledge about news
(Bennett, 1989), one might think that it could be associated with less stereotypical
processing and hence be less likely to relate to the LIB. Furthermore, web news
sources have been little studied in this context, so it is left as a research question
as to how these two news sources will be related to the LIB:
RQ2: What is the relationship between newspaper and web news use and the LIB?

This study attempts to improve on the earlier study of the LIB in response to TV
news not only by expanding the links between LIB and media use but also by

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examining a broader sample of adults rather than using a convenient sample of

college undergraduates. Students are not typical in their media-use habits, and
although the validity of results using student samples may not be an issue for
processing-oriented research questions (see Pingree et al., 2001), the generalizability
of findings will nonetheless be enhanced by broadening the base of our research
participants. Thus, this study attempts to look for more evidence of the LIB in
people’s reactions to television news stories about race in an adult sample using
more standard measures.

Methods
The results described in this paper were part of a larger study on people’s reactions to
race-related television news. The sample used in this study consisted of 208 White
adult members of the staff of a midsized private university in the Northeastern
United States. Data from 23 people of color who participated in the study are not
reported here. The participants had a mean age of 40.44 years, but despite efforts to
recruit men, the sample was severely skewed toward women, with 77.9% of the
participants being female.
Similar to Gilliam et al.’s (1996) study, the researcher and an assistant recruited
university staff, excluding students and faculty, to participate in an ‘‘impressions of
TV news’’ study by offering to pay them $10 for their time. Sessions were scheduled
for lunch hours and late afternoons over the course of 2 weeks, and participants self-
selected which session to attend. Sessions were held in a room with a large video
screen and varied in size from 5 to 33 people. Upon arrival, participants were told by
the White research assistant that they would be surveyed about the media-use habits
and their opinions concerning TV news, that they would watch a short video, and
that they would then be asked to respond to the video. To encourage open and
honest responses, participants were also told about procedures the researchers would
use to safeguard the anonymity of their responses. Once they consented to partic-
ipate, the respondents were given a previewing survey.
The previewing survey asked respondents to estimate how many a minutes a day
they spent watching local, national network, and cable television news; reading a daily
newspaper; and reading a news Web site (like CNN.com or NYTimes.com). It also
asked respondents to estimate how many hours of total television they watched in
a day. Other items on the survey, which are not reported here, asked about partic-
ipant’s perception of news credibility, their motivations for viewing TV news, and
other areas.
After completing the survey, participants watched a video of the first 8 minutes of
a television news broadcast from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which contained the ex-
perimental manipulation. The particular version of the video for each session was
chosen by the researcher prior to the arrival of the participants, rather than randomly
selected, to try to ensure a similar number of participants in the four conditions.
Participants saw one of four versions of the news broadcast, after which they were

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B. W. Gorham Linguistic Intergroup Bias

given postviewing surveys to complete. The videotape consisted of an opening ‘‘Got

Milk’’ commercial and then the newscast to the first commercial break. The newscast
contained four news stories, a weather segment, and two teases before the first com-
mercial break.
The two news anchors, a male and a female, were both White, as were the
reporters in all the stories. Unless otherwise noted, all the people presented in the
news stories were White. The first story in the broadcast, lasting 30 seconds, centered
on the rebuilding of a chemical plant in Baton Rouge that had recently been damaged
by an explosion. The second story in the newscast, nearly 2 minutes and 15 seconds
in length, focused on the families of several victims of murder, for which a suspect
had not yet been caught or even identified. Near the end of the story, the stand-up
reporter announces that police, who have been tight lipped in their investigation, will
only say that they want to talk to ‘‘this man.’’ At this point in the story (with only
about 15 seconds left in the package), the manipulation occurred, and subjects saw
one of four different versions of the story. In all versions of the story, the audio track,
in which the reporter describes the man’s height and weight but not his race, remains
the same. In two versions of the story, a close-up photograph of an African American
man’s face is shown surrounded by a red border. These two versions differed only in
the actual photograph. Similarly, two versions featured close-up photographs of two
different White men.
Two different African American men and two different White men were used in
the photographs to ensure that the results would be because of race and not because
of some unusual feature of a particular man’s face. This seems especially prudent
given that research on social perception suggests that facial characteristics can influ-
ence social judgments (Berry & Wero, 1993). To test for the similarity of the faces
within racial conditions, photos of four different Black men and four different White
men were judged using Rhodes’ (1988) facial ratings scales before the tapes were
selected for use. Ten White graduate students rated the faces, and the two that were
the most similar for each race in terms of how closely their scale scores corresponded
were used for the stimulus tape.
Two brief stories and a weather segment followed the crime story. Two teases,
one of which featured an African American football coach and one that featured an
African American state senator, were the final segments before a brief lotto screen
and a commercial. It is at this point that the assistant turned off the videotape and
handed out the postviewing surveys. The first 10 items of the postviewing survey
asked respondents about their mental activities during viewing, such as reflecting on
the content and seeing connections to their own lives, and their overall impressions
of the quality and credibility of the newscast. The next series of items contained the
LIB measure.
For each of the stories in the newscast, participants were asked to choose which of
four answers best summarized that story. Each of the choices corresponded to a level
of linguistic abstraction, such as ‘‘the female anchor waved to the crowd’’ (concrete
DAV) to ‘‘the female anchor is friendly’’ (abstract Adj). For the crime story, participants

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Linguistic Intergroup Bias B. W. Gorham

were asked which of the following they would choose to summarize the man’s role in
the story: The man police want to talk to probably hit the victims (DAV); the man
police want to talk to probably hurt the victims (IAV); the man police want to talk to
probably hated the victims (SV); and the man police want to talk to is probably
violent (Adj)1. The LIB, then, is operationalized as a greater proportion of partic-
ipants using the abstract descriptors like Adjs following exposure to the African
American photo compared to those exposed to a White man’s photo. Thus, it is a
between-subjects comparison of the abstractness of the language used to describe
people of the two groups. The remainder of the survey included a mix of close-ended
and open-ended questions used in the larger study and not reported here. The final
items on the postviewing survey measured demographic data but also included
Brigham’s (1993) Attitude Toward Blacks (ATB) scale, a 20-item, multifactor mea-
sure of prejudice.

Results
As a group, the 208 participants were relatively moderate news users, watching an
average of one local (M = 32.27 minutes, SD = 42.23) and one network newscast
(M = 24.46 minutes, SD = 31.55) a day as well as some cable news (M = 15.90
minutes, SD = 24.78) and reading a modest amount of news in the paper (M = 17.66
minutes, SD = 26.34) and on the Web (M = 18.02 minutes, SD = 26.38). The high
standard deviations indicate that some people were much more frequent users of
news media than others. The group also watched an average of 3.12 hours of tele-
vision a day (SD = 3.51).
The results from the two White and Black conditions were first compared to
check for any intrarace differences. Chi-square tests of independence between the
conditions on the LIB revealed no significant differences in how participants reacted
within the two racial conditions (White 1 and White 2: x2 = 1.18, df = 3, ns, Cramer’s
V = .12; Black 1 and Black 2: x2 = 2.80, df = 3, ns, Cramer’s V = .16), so the data from
the two White suspect conditions and the two Black suspect conditions were col-
lapsed into single White and Black conditions.
These two conditions were then compared, and there were significant differences in
the responses between participants who saw a White suspect and a Black suspect for
both concrete and abstract descriptors (x2 = 17.36, df = 3, p = .001, Cramer’s V = .29).
A greater proportion of respondents (59.6%) who saw the White suspect chose the
concrete (IAV) description (‘‘the man who police want to talk to probably hurt the
victims’’) compared to those who saw a Black suspect (33.6%). A significantly larger
percentage of those who saw the Black suspect (58.4%) chose the abstract (Adj)
description (‘‘the man who police want to talk to is probably violent’’) compared to
those who saw a White suspect (31.5%). Thus, the language participants chose was
more abstract following exposure to an African American suspect, and H1 is supported.
To test for a relationship between news media use and the LIB, participants were
categorized as light (or infrequent) or heavy (or frequent) users of each news medium

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B. W. Gorham Linguistic Intergroup Bias

Table 1 Cross-Tabulation of Linguistic Level of Response by Race of Suspect, Controlling for

TV News Use
Medium Media Race of Percent Choosing N x2 p Cramers V
Use Suspect Linguistic Level
DAV IAV SV Adj
Local TV news Light
White 2.2 60.0 2.2 35.6 45 4.79 ns .22
Black 5.6 38.9 5.6 50.0 54
Heavy White 0.0 59.1 13.6 27.3 44 17.36 .001 .41
Black 1.7 28.8 3.4 66.1 59
Network Light White 2.2 64.4 4.4 28.9 45 4.41 ns .21
TV news Black 3.9 43.1 5.9 47.1 51
Heavy White 0.0 54.5 11.4 34.1 44 15.05 .002 .38
Black 3.2 25.8 3.2 67.7 62
Cable TV news Light White 2.1 59.6 4.3 34.0 47 6.43 ns .25
Black 1.8 35.1 7.0 56.1 57
Heavy White 0.0 59.5 11.9 28.6 42 15.65 .001 .40
Black 5.4 32.1 1.8 60.7 56
Note: df = 3 for all comparisons. Linguistic level refers to answers to the question ‘‘The man
police want to talk to probably .’’ DAV = hit the victims; IAV = hurt the victims; SV = hated
the victims; Adj = is violent.

based on median splits of their responses to the appropriate items. Chi-squares were
then run on each of the groups using cross-tabulations. As Table 1 highlights, news
media use is indeed related to the presence of the LIB: For each of the television news
variables, the chi-square of the LIB responses was not statistically significant for the
light users but was for heavy users, supporting the notion that frequent users of TV
news are more likely to exhibit the LIB than infrequent viewers of TV news. Thus,
H2, H3, and H4 are supported.
As for the research questions, chi-square tests also revealed that heavy users of
television are more likely to engage in the LIB than light users of television, sug-
gesting that cultivation may indeed be at work (see Table 2). Newspaper use also
showed a significant relationship with LIB: Increased use of the local newspaper
was associated with more abstract descriptions following the Black suspect com-
pared to the White suspect. A different pattern emerged for use of news Web sites,
however. Infrequent users of Web news exhibited the LIB a bit more strongly than
those who used news Web sites more frequently. However, because both chi-
squares are significant, Web site use does not impact the LIB, suggesting that the
Web is the only news medium of those tested here that has no relationship to the
development of the LIB.
One last result is worth noting, although it was not the subject of a hypothesis or
research question. When participants’ scores on the Attitudes Toward Blacks scale
were dichotomized into high- and low-prejudiced groups and compared to the LIB

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Linguistic Intergroup Bias B. W. Gorham

Table 2 Cross-Tabulation of Linguistic Level of Response by Race of Suspect, Controlling for

Media Use
Medium Media Race of Percent Choosing N x2 p Cramers V
Use Suspect Linguistic Level
DAV IAV SV Adj
Overall TV Light White 2.2 53.3 2.2 42.2 45 2.70 ns .16
Black 1.7 38.3 5.0 55.0 60
Heavy White 0.0 65.9 13.6 20.5 44 22.53 .001 .48
Black 5.7 28.3 3.8 62.3 53
Newspaper Light White 1.9 63.5 5.8 28.8 52 5.03 ns .22
Black 3.7 42.6 5.6 48.1 54
Heavy White 0.0 54.1 10.8 35.1 37 12.76 .005 .37
Black 3.4 25.4 3.4 67.8 59
Web news Light White 0.0 60.9 8.7 30.4 46 14.69 .002 .36
Black 6.0 34.3 1.5 58.2 67
Heavy White 2.3 58.1 7.0 32.6 43 7.67 .05 .29
Black 0.0 32.6 8.7 58.7 46
Note: df = 3 for all comparisons. Linguistic level refers to answers to the question ‘‘The man
police want to talk to probably .’’ DAV = hit the victims; IAV = hurt the victims; SV = hated
the victims; Adj = is violent.

responses, there was no difference between the two groups (low prejudice: x2 =
11.71, df = 3, p , .01, Cramer’s V = 34; high prejudice: x2 = 10.08, df = 3, p =
.02, Cramer’s V = .31). Both groups exhibited the LIB, meaning that how one scored
on the prejudice scale did not have an impact on how one answered the LIB. This
is in line with previous findings (von Hippel et al., 1997) that explicit prejudice
measures will show no relationship with implicit measures such as the LIB and hence
reflect the cognitive biases that occur outside of conscious awareness or control.

Discussion
This study examined the LIB, which is the use of either more concrete or more ab-
stract language based on the behavior and the group membership of the subject being
described. The LIB is considered an implicit marker of group differentiation and
stereotyping, especially in the context of behaviors that conform to the stereotype for
that particular group. Using an experimental design where the race of a suspect in
a crime story was manipulated, this study found that White adults were more likely
to endorse more abstract descriptions of an African American suspect and use more
concrete descriptors for a White suspect. Furthermore, this tendency was related to
news media use, such that people who more frequently watch television news, overall
television, and read the newspaper are more likely to exhibit the LIB.
The results support the idea that race-related news stories will prime dominant
stereotypes of race and that these stereotypes, once triggered, guide interpretation in

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B. W. Gorham Linguistic Intergroup Bias

ways that may help cultivate dominant views of race. A greater proportion of the
participants who viewed an African American suspect in a television news story about
unsolved violent crimes chose more abstract language to describe the man’s role in
the story compared to participants who viewed a White suspect. The language used
to describe the White suspect, in contrast, suggests a more limited bounded action
rather than an inherent state of being. The interpretations viewers gave of the suspect
were more abstract—and thus more dispositional, less situational, and reflecting
more of an understanding that the individual represents his group—when that sus-
pect was an African American than when he was White. Given research about the
attribution error and how people systematically tend to favor the in-group over the
out-group in their perceptions and thought processes, perhaps these White partic-
ipants thought the more abstract descriptions were more ‘‘natural’’ and fit the story
better than the more concrete ones when that suspect was Black, thus revealing the
operation of dominant stereotypes at work.
It is important to keep in mind that these results do not necessarily reflect
conscious thought processes. Instead, the results suggest that such biased processing
is likely going on without the awareness or control of the participants, given that
there was no relationship between the LIB and an explicit measure of prejudice. The
experiment was designed to afford participants a degree of anonymity so that they
would feel comfortable expressing their true feelings: Respondents were never asked
for their names, were paid in cash, and were instructed to place their surveys in an
envelope and place the envelope in a box away from the research assistant. Although
the group of university staff was largely low in prejudice according to their ATB
scores—on the ATB scale, where the range of possible scores is from 20 (very negative
attitudes toward Blacks, thus very high prejudice) to 140 (very positive attitudes
toward Blacks, thus low prejudice), this group had a mean of 109 and a median of
111—there were people nonetheless who scored in the high-prejudice area of the
scale. Finding the LIB statistically separate from the explicit prejudice measure further
supports the idea that biased processing is occurring without the conscious awareness
or control of the participants. Instead, it would appear that these respondents were
cognitively inclined to see these social groups as being different and to see being
violent as an expected behavior for African Americans. Thus, the automatic activation
of stereotypical schema for African Americans influences the language processes of
the respondents, even if they would not consciously endorse the stereotypes.
Although this study cannot speak to the causal nature of the relationship between
long-term media use and the perception of social groups, it does find a necessary
condition for cultivation: a correlation between media-use variables and responses that
support dominant ideology. Frequent use of local, network, and cable television news,
as well as frequent use of the local newspaper, were all associated with the presence of
the LIB in ways that support negative stereotypes of African Americans. Furthermore,
overall television use was also associated with the LIB, perhaps suggesting that despite
the plethora of channels and choices in today’s media environment, the symbolic
message that African Americans are violent is nonetheless hard to escape. Social

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Linguistic Intergroup Bias B. W. Gorham

psychologists often suggest that the social world is awash in stereotypical portrayals of
African Americans, and this observation is supported by content analyses of media
content, particularly news. The argument advanced by Devine (1989) and others is
that such images of the cultural stereotypes help develop, maintain, and reinforce
schema that reflect the cultural stereotypes and that these stereotypes then influence
information processing. This study demonstrated that implicit, stereotype-congruent
responses can be primed by media images and that these responses are more likely for
people who consume more television and television news. Although they do not offer
any evidence on the direction of causality, these results do offer more pieces of the
puzzle as to how media might cultivate dominant views of race.
At the same time, use of the web for news did not have an impact on the LIB.
Although it is difficult to draw any sound conclusions from this without knowing
more details about which Web sites the participants visit, perhaps this finding de-
notes a difference between national and local print-oriented media. ‘‘If it bleeds, it
leads’’ is arguably a mantra for all news outlets, but it seems to be much more the
purview of local media. Perhaps the Web sites of large news organizations with
national reputations do not feature as much crime news about African Americans
as more local media, or perhaps people are not exposed to those stories to the same
extent as they are with other media. It cannot be determined from this data what is
different about Web news, but it does seem noteworthy that this news medium did
not show the same relationship with the LIB.
Beyond the lack of detail in the media-use measures (it would be interesting, e.g.,
to compare which cable news networks people primarily watched), there are other
limitations in the study that future research should note. Perhaps the patterns would
be even stronger if the potential in-group member were not also being constructed as
a criminal, that is, perhaps the relevant out-group for some of the of these partici-
pants was ‘‘criminals’’ and not necessarily ‘‘African Americans’’ or even ‘‘African
American criminals.’’ For some of these largely low-prejudiced working- and middle-
class Whites, perhaps the suspect’s race was trumped by the fact that he was a
suspected criminal. He would therefore be considered outside of one’s in-group, thus
depressing the overall influence of the stereotype on the LIB.
Although the fact that the sample was made up of university staff is perhaps
a step up from the use of undergraduates, one should nonetheless exercise caution in
generalizing beyond this sample. It was a self-selected sample, of course, but it was
also an overwhelmingly female one. Although there is no reason to necessarily think
that females somehow process information from television news stories differently
than males, it is known that women and men are not equal in their exposure to news
media. Thus, perhaps the patterns noted are unduly influenced by the female major-
ity of this sample.
As relevant as news stories about crime are for studying White’s cognitive reac-
tions to African Americans, future research should think about applying the theories
to research designs beyond the criminal paradigm and beyond the strict boundaries
of Black and White. Although I am just as guilty of this as the next researcher, studies

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B. W. Gorham Linguistic Intergroup Bias

such as this one that use ‘‘Black crime’’ as a research stimulus for Whites may well be
playing into the maintenance of the very schema we hope to challenge. Athleticism is
also a prominent trait in the stereotype of African Americans (Devine & Elliot, 1995),
for example, so perhaps we would find the LIB in a comparison of stories featuring
Black and White athletes. Future research should seek to broaden the potential pool
of participants used in the research as well as the topics used in the stimulus.
Despite these limitations, this study suggests that the LIB should be the focus of
more attention by researchers interested in the effects of media content, particularly
those interested in how media may implicitly work to cultivate certain views of the
world. In addition to research about race, the LIB could highlight important differ-
ences in how audiences react to increasingly polarized political media content. Per-
haps the LIB could tease out the social constructions audiences have of ‘‘liberals’’ and
‘‘conservatives’’ and highlight the types of content that prime political intergroup
processing. In any case, the LIB is an implicit and unobtrusive way that language can
reflect the dominant ideology of race. Given the complex ways in which people can
maintain both sympathetic, low-prejudiced views of minorities while simultaneously
harboring feelings of discomfort (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986) or make interpretations
that are congruent with stereotypes, despite their conscious egalitarian beliefs
(Devine, 1989; Monteith, 1993), uncovering more of the subtle ways that media
influence our thoughts about race is a positive step toward being able to intervene
in the process. Only by understanding the many ways in which viewers apply mean-
ings to media content about race, can we hope to use mass media to further social
justice and equality.

Acknowledgments
A research grant from the Newhouse School was used to fund this research. The
author thanks Dave Kurpius for his help in securing the stimulus tapes and Jamie
Butler for her work in securing participants.

Note
1 A series of items based on von Hippel et al.’s (1997) study was also used, in which
participants were asked to individually rate how well the phrase from each linguistic level
described the man’s role in the story. The results from these items were not statistically
significant and are not reported here. It may be that participants were thrown off given
that every other story was asked about only using a forced-choice measure.

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