Group Bouba-Kiki effects: The interplay of social categorization, competition, and sound symbolism

Over the last several decades, social psychologists who study groups have investigated the extent to which top-down factors (e.g., group membership) interact with bottom-up factors (e.g., low-level aspects of visual perception) to influence social inference. Although it has been widely understood that language is used to communicate social category distinctions through group labels, the contribution of low-level aspects of language has not been considered. This is a potentially consequential oversight because research on sound symbolism has established that the phonemes of words provide inherent meaning. One of the most well-known and robust examples of sound symbolism is the Bouba-Kiki effect, where round-associated sounds (e.g., "Bouba," "Maluma") are associated with round shapes, and sharp-associated sounds (e.g., "Kiki," "Takete") are associated with angular shapes. We examined how sound symbolism and intergroup factors might together give rise to inferences about social groups. Study 1 found that when people are making sense of novel groups to which they are not assigned, then sound symbolism guides their impressions of the groups. Study 2 revealed that in a competitive intergroup context, the sound symbolism effect is diminished or even reversed, and behavior is driven by intergroup bias. Study 3 found that the sound symbolism effect may be partially resilient even in an intergroup context when there is less implied competition between novel groups. Together, this work suggests that although sound structure can carry inherent meaning even when reasoning about novel groups, assignment into groups can alter the inferences that people make about others from phonemic information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).