Gender differences in communicative abstraction.

Drawing on construal level theory, which suggests that experiencing a communicative audience as proximal rather than distal leads speakers to frame messages more concretely, we examine gender differences in linguistic abstraction. In a meta-analysis of prior studies examining the effects of distance on communication, we find that women communicate more concretely than men when an audience is described as being psychologically close. These gender differences in linguistic abstraction are eliminated when speakers consider an audience whose distance has been made salient (Study 1). In studies that follow, we examine gender differences in linguistic abstraction in contexts where the nature of the audience is not specified. Across a written experimental context (Study 2), a large corpus of online blog posts (Study…