Running Head: Message The relevance of language for social psychology

predicates. In contrast, unexpected or surprising behaviour will be described in concrete terms. The opposite predictions are derivable from a motivational perspective. One possible implication of Tajfel and Turner's (1979) social identity theory is that LIB reflects an in-group protective motivation. This perspective, in contrast to the differential expectancy model suggests that irrespective of expectancies LIB will occur as a function of the valence of the behaviors in question. Indeed, Maass, Milesi, Zabbini and Stahlberg (1994) in a series of three experiments find support for the expectancy hypothesis rather than the in-group protective motivation notion. However, more recently, Maass and Stahlberg (1993) have reported that under conditions where intergroup competition is high and salient one finds that the Linguistic Intergroup Bias is more pronounced than the differential expectancies condition. Taken together Maass and Stahlberg (1993) suggest that differential expectations are sufficient to produce the Linguistic Intergroup Bias. However, under heightened intergroup competition conditions the in-group-protective motivation increases this effect. They could show that there is a correlation between the