Words like “holiday” or “vacation,” “to start” or “to begin,” and “my friend’s cat” or “the cat of my friend” illustrate that our language has various ways to express the same ideas and concepts. But does the choice of certain expressions influence our preferences for cooperating with specific individuals? A research team led by Theresa Matzinger from the University of Vienna looked into this question and found that people are more inclined to collaborate with those who make similar language choices in their conversations. The findings indicate that a key element might be the sense of belonging to the same social group. This study was recently featured in the journal Language and Cognition.
In their experiment, 100 English-speaking participants described images to two conversation partners. The images depicted situations that could be articulated using two different grammatical structures that conveyed the same meaning. For example, they could choose between “John gives Mary the book” or “John gives the book to Mary.” Afterward, the roles were switched, and the participants received their partners’ descriptions of pictures. Finally, they had to choose which partner they wished to collaborate with, motivated by a follow-up game that offered a monetary reward. “As we anticipated, our participants preferred conversation partners who spoke similarly and employed the same grammatical structures,” explains Theresa Matzinger, the study’s lead author.
Group membership is more influential than adaptability
In another part of the study, the team sought to determine what factors influenced the preference for linguistically similar partners. They proposed two hypotheses:
- People are drawn to others with similar speech because they perceive them as members of the same social group, making them more inclined to cooperate with group members than outsiders.
- People favor those who speak similarly because they may believe that such individuals are more likely to adapt their language, thus being more cooperative in general.
To explore these theories, participants were asked to describe images using the grammatical structure that felt less natural to them. When they chose cooperation partners again, they opted for those whose linguistic style closely matched their natural way of speaking, rather than those whose speech mirrored how they had expressed themselves during the experiment.
“This strongly supports our first hypothesis: A sense of belonging to the same social group, based on authentic linguistic expressions, plays a more significant role in choosing cooperation partners. The perception that the other individual is adjusting their language to match one’s own and may therefore be more cooperative was considerably less influential,” adds Matzinger.
Matzinger concludes: “Our findings reveal that even minor linguistic differences, often unnoticed, can affect our willingness to cooperate.” The researchers hope that these insights will help enhance our understanding of cooperative decision-making within linguistically diverse groups and mitigate biases against individuals who express themselves differently.
