Compensating through Jargon for Status Signaling among Psychology Students

Abstract

Academic jargon is often framed as a functional tool for efficient communication among experts, yet prior research suggests it may also serve as a status signal, particularly for individuals occupying lower-status positions. Drawing on theories of compensatory status signaling, the present research examines whether women studying psychology—a historically underrepresented group in academic science—engage in motivated communication and use jargon when presenting their scientific work. Using data from 1,739 research conference posters, two studies employed computational text analysis to examine gender differences in language use. Study 1 assessed motives of communication using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software (LIWC2015), focusing on latent variables of authenticity and drive. Gender of each first author was predicted using the DemografixeR R package, which scored first names based on historical name usage. Results indicated that women’s posters exhibited significantly higher drive and lower authenticity scores than men’s, suggesting greater evaluative concern and impression management. Study 2 examined whether these motivational differences translated into greater jargon use, operationalized as linguistic complexity via 36 readability indices derived from the Quanteda R package. No significant gender differences emerged across any measures of linguistic complexity. Findings suggest that while women may experience heightened pressures in academic communication, these pressures do not manifest in greater use of complex or jargon-laden language. This study contributes to the literature on the intersection of gender and communication, highlighting the need to reconsider assumptions about jargon as a compensatory strategy among marginalized scholars.