General threat leading to defensive reactions: A field experiment on linguistic features

Abstract

Supported by several theoretical perspectives on motivation, we based an experiment on the idea that threat motivates people to become defensive and to choose that which is familiar and unequivocal in a given situation. The present field experiment confirmed that a general relevant threat can motivate people in a linguistic multiculture to conform more rigidly to their own language, and hence accentuate their own linguistic singularity. In addition, an exploratory analysis of tolerance towards the competing language revealed that non-threatened people tended to open up toward the other language. A dual-motive model that accounts for opening-up versus defensive reactions is proposed.