Research on linguistic intergroup bias has shown that an audience can infer from how someone’s actions are being described—abstractly or concretely—whether that person is being categorized as “us” or “them.” For example, experimental subjects make inferences from the way someone describes someone else as to whether that person is likely to share the same political party as the person they are describing, or the same religion.1 To describe someone as a “criminal” is both to mark that person with a terrifying permanent character trait and simultaneously to place the person outside the circle of
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