Communication patterns in interdependent relationships

Two studies were designed to investigate how the type of interdependence (cooperative vs. competitive) between a speaker and a recipient influences communicators' descriptions of positive and negative target behaviors. The target-addressee relationship was a positive one in the first study. It was expected that speakers in the cooperative condition would describe positive target behaviors in a more abstract way, whereas in the competitive condition, negative target behaviors would be described in a more abstract way. In the second study, the addressee-target relationship was negative. Here we expected that the positive target behaviors would be described more concretely in the cooperation condition, whereas the reverse pattern was predicted in the competition condition. The results broadly supported these predictions. The implications of these findings for the linguistic intergroup bias are described.