The Effects of Linguistic Voice on Evaluations and Attributions of Ingroup And Outgroup Members

This current study investigated the effects of English language active and passive voice on evaluations and attributions of responsibility toward an ingroup member or an outgroup member who behaved in either a positive or a negative manner. Prior theoretical and empirical analyses suggested that passive voice transformations would have the effect of: (1) reducing the saliency of the logical subject of a sentence relative to the logical object, thereby (2) reducing attributions of responsibility toward the logical subject. Results indicated that, regardless of group membership, attributions of responsibility for positive behavior, but not negative behavior, were reduced when described in the passive voice compared to the active voice. A passive voice transformation also had the effect of reducing the extremity of ingroup evaluations relative to outgroup evaluations for both positive and negative behaviors. We discuss the implications of these data with reference to social-linguistic analyses of masking and influence.