Representations of refugees: linguistic abstractness and social perceptions

Abstract

The paper examines the relationship among stereotype content, essentialism, and preferred language abstraction in refugee media representations. In two studies, participants were asked to choose captions of differential degree of language abstraction (according to the linguistic category model, from descriptive action verbs to adjectives) thought appropriate for an image of refugees, after they first completed a survey on stereotype content (perceived competence and warmth) and essentialist beliefs (Study 2 only) about refugees. In both studies, perceived competence predicted increased language abstraction. In Study 2, competence was also found to mediate the effects of essentialism on language abstraction. These results underline the importance of stereotype content to biased language preference.

Keywords

• language abstraction
• linguistic category model
• media representations
• refugees
• essentialist beliefs
• stereotypes