Open Access

Forms of verbal violence, such as Hate Speech and Cyberbullying, currently are issues with high societal relevance. In the social discourse they are associated with brutalization of social interaction. Against this background it is necessary to integrate the topic into school lessons. This chapter outlines a teaching unit on verbal violence in the digital age. It has been developed together with students and can therefore be used in German classes but it is also relevant for use in academic teaching.

Prejudice against a social group may lead to discrimination of members of this group. One very strong cue of group membership is a (non)standard accent in speech. Surprisingly, hardly any interventions against accent-based discrimination have been tested. In the current article, we introduce an intervention in which what participants experience themselves unobtrusively changes their evaluations of others. In the present experiment, participants in the experimental condition talked to a confederate in a foreign language before the experiment, whereas those in the control condition received no treatment. Replicating previous research, participants in the control condition discriminated against Turkish-accented job candidates. In contrast, those in the experimental condition evaluated Turkish- and standard-accented candidates as similarly competent. We discuss potential mediating and moderating factors of this effect.

The way media depict women and men can reinforce or diminish gender stereotyping. Which part does language play in this context? Are roles perceived as more gender-balanced when feminine role nouns are used in addition to masculine ones? Research on gender-inclusive language shows that the use of feminine-masculine word pairs tends to increase the visibility of women in various social roles. For example, when speakers of German were asked to name their favorite “heroine or hero in a novel,” they listed more female characters than when asked to name their favorite “hero in a novel.” The research reported in this article examines how the use of gender-inclusive language in news reports affects readers’ own usage of such forms as well as their mental representation of women and men in the respective roles. In the main experiment, German participants (N = 256) read short reports about heroes or murderers which contained either masculine generics or gender-inclusive forms (feminine-masculine word pairs). Gender-inclusive forms enhanced participants’ own usage of gender-inclusive language and this resulted in more gender-balanced mental representations of these roles. Reading about “heroines and heroes” made participants assume a higher percentage of women among persons performing heroic acts than reading about “heroes” only, but there was no such effect for murderers. A post-test suggested that this might be due to a higher accessibility of female exemplars in the category heroes than in the category murderers. Importantly, the influence of gender-inclusive language on the perceived percentage of women in a role was mediated by speakers’ own usage of inclusive forms. This suggests that people who encounter gender-inclusive forms and are given an opportunity to use them, use them more themselves and in turn have more gender-balanced mental representations of social roles.

Psychological research has neglected people whose accent does not match their appearance. Most research on person perception has focused on appearance, overlooking accents that are equally important social cues. If accents were studied, it was often done in isolation (i.e., detached from appearance). We examine how varying accent and appearance information about people affects evaluations. We show that evaluations of expectancy-violating people shift in the direction of the added information. When a job candidate looked foreign, but later spoke with a native accent, his evaluations rose and he was evaluated best of all candidates (Experiment 1a). However, the sequence in which information was presented mattered: When heard first and then seen, his evaluations dropped (Experiment 1b). Findings demonstrate the importance of studying the combination and sequence of different types of information in impression formation. They also allow predicting reactions to ethnically mixed people, who are increasingly present in modern societies.