Self presentation and being agreeable

The article that I found for Monday was about presenting oneself and trying to make people like you when discussing different political views. It was called “Taking the Edge off disagreement: linguistic abstractness and self-presentation to a heterogeneous audience” by Monica Rubini of the University of Bologna and Harold Sigall of the University of Maryland. The article became very technical, but I will do my best to summarize it:

The authors did an experiment where they told participants that they wanted them to talk to two strangers and try to get the strangers to like them. They two people were either both of the same political view, both of differing political views, or a mix of one person with the same political view and one person of differing views from the participant. The language was measured by how abstract it was. There were four categories starting from the most concrete (also listed are the examples that they gave in the article):
1. Descriptive action verbs – uses objective language – “John tripped Tom”
2. Interpretive action verbs – verbs that evaluate the action – “John injured Tom”
3. State Verbs – verbs that do not have temporal or situational reference – “John envies Tom”
4. Adjectives – “transcend specific situations, objects, behaviors, or reference persons” (344), - “John is nasty”

The participants differed in how they presented themselves linguistically. People tended to use more abstract language with the people with whom they shared political views because it is more “trans-situational and stable over time.” (344). Although I’m not completely sure, I think that this means that the people were comfortable making much broader statements that didn’t have the same amount of evidence as concrete statements which were used with people with whom the participants did not share political views. It seems to me that abstract language can be the most easily misinterpreted. When someone does not agree with your political opinions, they may easily take an abstract adjectives and put a different meaning than what was intended. This could lead to a misunderstanding and make the participant disagreeable to the other two interviewers. When someone agrees with you, then they will also agree with your abstract language. It is safer to make broad statements when everyone already agrees with you.