The Effects of Linguistic Voice on Evaluations and Attributions of Ingroup And Outgroup Members

Abstract

This current study investigated the effects of English language active and passive voice on evaluations and attributions of responsibility toward an ingroup member or an outgroup member who behaved in either a positive or a negative manner. Prior theoretical and empirical analyses suggested that passive voice transformations would have the effect of: (1) reducing the saliency of the logical subject of a sentence relative to the logical object, thereby (2) reducing attributions of responsibility toward the logical subject. Results indicated that, regardless of group membership, attributions of responsibility for positive behavior, but not negative behavior, were reduced when described in the passive voice compared to the active voice. A passive voice transformation also had the effect of reducing the extremity of ingroup evaluations relative to outgroup evaluations for both positive and negative behaviors. We discuss the implications of these data with reference to social-linguistic analyses of masking and influence.

The Voice of Cognition: Active and Passive Voice Influence Distance and Construal

“…A 5 × 2 ANOVA revealed a significant difference in Easiness across the five paragraphs, F (4, 297) = 39.63, p < .001, d = .72 (95% CI = [.49, .96]), which is not surprising given that the different events depicted would result in different perceptions of ease of understanding. Furthermore, participants reading the active voice found the paragraphs easier to understand ( M = 6.81, SD = 2.51) than those reading the passive voice ( M = 6.24, SD = 2.39), F (1, 297) = 8.42, p = .004, d = .33 (95% CI = [.10, .56]), in line with findings from the literature on evaluation of active versus passive voice (Platow & Brodie, 1999). There was no interaction crossing the two factors, F (4, 297) = 1.14, p = .33, d = .12 (95% CI = [–.10, .35]).…”

Double Standards in Sentence Structure

“…Male readers attributed more victim responsibility and less harm to victims after passivevoice descriptions, although female readers did not show the same tendency (Henley et al, 1995;also see Bohner, 2001). Similar effects of the passive voice also apply to nonsexual types of aggressive behavior (Platow & Brodie, 1999). These effects of the passive voice on comprehension suggest that writers' use of verb voice influences how individual readers view violence against women.…”

Voice Changes Meaning: The Role of Gay- Versus Straight-Sounding Voices in Sentence Interpretation

“…On the one hand, to interpret or disambiguate messages, people rely on elements that are present in the message, such as nouns, pronouns, verbs, or entire clauses. For instance, causality in a sentence is interpreted differently depending on the type of verb used (Garvey & Caramazza, 1974) and an agent is held more responsible when the sentence is presented in active rather than passive form (Platow & Brodie, 1999). Similarly, both the definitional gender (e.g., king) and stereotypic gender (e.g., nurse) of nouns affect sentence disambiguation processes by slowing down comprehension in cases of mismatches (e.g., Kreiner, Sturt, & Garrod, 2008).…”