'Holiday' or 'Vacation': Similar language leads to more cooperation

'Holiday' or 'vacation', 'to start' or 'to begin', 'my friend's cat' or 'the cat of my friend' -- in our language, there are different ways of expressing the same things and concepts. But can the choice of a particular variant determine whether we prefer to cooperate with certain people rather than with others? A research team investigated this and showed that people are more likely to co-operate with others if they make similar linguistic choices in a conversation. The experiment suggests that the decisive factor is probably the feeling of belonging to the same social group.

'Holiday' or 'vacation', 'to start' or 'to begin', 'my friend's cat' or 'the cat of my friend' -- in our language, there are different ways of expressing the same things and concepts. But can the choice of a particular variant determine whether we prefer to cooperate with certain people rather than with others? A research team investigated this and showed that people are more likely to co-operate with others if they make similar linguistic choices in a conversation. The experiment suggests that the decisive factor is probably the feeling of belonging to the same social group.

Read more https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/07/240730134841.htm