Little is still known about how the language used in social protests affects people’s behavioral expressions of support. This study aims to bridge this gap and investigates the impact of dehumanizing and humorous language employed by protesters in their slogans on the decisions of other individuals to join or openly support such protests. Two experiments were conducted, revealing that exposure to dehumanizing language did not significantly alter the likelihood of supporting protests compared to non-dehumanizing language. However, when combined with humor, dehumanizing language had a positive effect on behavioral expressions of support. In the second experiment we replicated this effect and revealed the mechanism behind it: humor diminished the perceived violence associated with a message containing dehumanizing language, thus increasing the likelihood of individuals acting upon and supporting the social protest. These findings shed light on the factors influencing the varying levels of support observed across different social movements.

中文翻译：

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社会抗议中的非人化和幽默语言对支持行为表达的影响

关于社会抗议中使用的语言如何影响人们表达支持的行为，人们仍然知之甚少。这项研究旨在弥合这一差距，并调查抗议者在口号中使用的非人性和幽默语言对其他人加入或公开支持此类抗议的决定的影响。进行了两项实验，结果表明，与非非人性化语言相比，接触非人性化语言并没有显着改变支持抗议的可能性。然而，当与幽默相结合时，非人性化的语言会对支持的行为表达产生积极的影响。在第二个实验中，我们复制了这种效应并揭示了其背后的机制：幽默减少了与包含非人性语言的信息相关的感知暴力，从而增加了个人采取行动并支持社会抗议的可能性。这些发现揭示了影响不同社会运动中观察到的不同支持水平的因素。