‘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.
